Google has unleashed its social networking response to Facebook, named Google+. Apparently this has been in the works for awhile, and while just about everyone is going to start drawing comparisons between Google+ and Facebook, there’s a fundamental reason why they’re different: their focus.
Facebook’s seeming focus is on the accumulation of friends in a relatively sterile environment. To be honest, there’s a reason for this: Facebook was developed as a better version of MySpace, the social network most of us were using before Facebook came along. On MySpace, the more friends you had, the more popular you were. It’s how we got MySpace reality stars like Tila Tequila, and it’s still a pretty powerful tool for bands and musicians to this day – even if it did just get bought for a mere $35 million.
At first, when Facebook was a limited network of people from different schools, the numbers were smaller and more manageable, but as Facebook began to open up to more and more markets – and eventually everybody – they had to adjust to reflect this. First there were fan pages, and then, eventually just pages. Facebook has become a marketplace and a central hub for many businesses to get the word out. The more people who like your page, the broader a reach an audience you have.
Facebook is, essentially, about the things that you like, and sharing those likes and interests with people in your social network. It’s also a vehicle for the things you like to reach you. Even though Facebook doesn’t have the same visual customization that MySpace had, you are able to customize your experience based on what it is that you like. Your likes are proudly on display, to be seen by the whole world.
Google+ doesn’t seem to be jumping on the friend accumulation bandwagon. Just as Facebook was a response to MySpace’s ad overrun webscape and over abundance of glitter graphics, Google+ has at its center one of the more intimate and important aspects of friendships: understanding that there’s just some things that we don’t share with everyone. Google+, unlike Facebook, acknowledges that all friends and friendships are not the same.
This understanding can be said to be due, in part, to the epic failure of Google Buzz – Google’s last and not-so-hot social media experiment. Google Buzz initially shared everything with everybody, and it created a lot of sticky situations. Google+ seeks to avoid this through the use of Circles: an easy-to-use visual experience that will ask you upon adding friends what circle of friends or social clique of yours they belong to, suggesting groups and letting you make up your own. You control who sees what, and who is in what group.
To be fair, Facebook has tried to do this, implementing features like groups, family relations, and privacy settings based on those groups, but by the time Facebook began to do this, it was too late. We already had our 4,000+ friends on our lists, some of whom we knew, and most of whom we didn’t. It would be exceedingly tedious to go back through and try to assign each of those people into one of your groups. Even now, friend groups are difficult to understand and even difficult to access and manage. Many of the features are hidden away on an obscure “edit friends” page that doesn’t really translate to “edit friend sharing features”.
There’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t seem to care much about user privacy in the first place. Routinely Facebook will roll out features that either expose your information to more people that you didn’t want it shared with, or they’ll come out with something that completely obliterates all the privacy options you spent so long setting up. At some points websites had access to and shared what you were doing without your consent (you had to “opt-out” rather than “opt-in”). Independent developers felt the need to come up with apps to help people navigate the murky waters of Facebook privacy settings as a response.
In contrast, due to their bad experience on their first try at making things social, Google has made it painstakingly clear and simple to control your sharing. A lot of this is accomplished by having the assignment of friends into groups occur in the beginning, when you are adding them. Google has always been about information, and Google+ still seems to focus on that, but it concentrates on how that information is shared with friends, based on social realities. And in this case, information is anything: pictures from your Picasa folders, information, things that you have +1′d on various websites. Google+ is about controlled content sharing, in a way that’s different from Facebook and other content sharing networks, like Twitter.
The comparisons between Facebook and Google+ in the coming weeks and months will inevitably come. It will be interesting to see how, past its beta, Google+ evolves as a social network. Each network is the response to the one that came before it. It’s just a matter of how.