Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Google Plus One

I've had a couple of days now to play with Google Plus and am hereby declaring myself  an official member of its bandwagon. In one fell swoop, Google has identified Facebook and Twitter's weaknesses, fixed them, and combined them into one holistic service. Facebook, the ball's now in your court.

Speaking of Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg had this to say (via Techcrunch) about Google's "circles" innovation:

The definition of groups is . . . everyone inside the group knows who else is in the group

Really? Once most people get past their freshman year of high school, they tend to regard exclusive "circles" of friends as childish, don't they? Most "groups" and "circles" are diffused and evolving. For example, I am a big fan of the San Francisco Giants. Many members of my family are also Giants fans, though certainly not all. Likewise, many people I went to high school with are Giants fans, as are a fair number of people I met in college, since I attended both high school and college in California. Yet in subsequent years I've met plenty of Giants fans through other life experiences- I even had a long conversation about the team once while chatting with a stranger in Luang Prabang, Laos. It would be unrealistic to expect all of these people to know each other simply because they're all Giants fans, wouldn't it?

I can see why the Zuck would be snippy, though. Through Facebook he did the heavy lifting of introducing Baby Boomers, Luddites, and yak farmers from Bhutan to social networking, but now he can legitimately fear quite a few of these people will ditch him at the altar for Google.

But Zuckerberg can take solace that in essence, Facebook is a victim of its own success. When practically the whole sentient world signed up, the site became an unwieldy beast where users lived in constant fear that well-intentioned friends would tag them in embarrassing photographs. In the last two years Facebook has become the world's largest awkward zone- imagine a drunken party with your buddies being crashed by your parents, the local dry cleaner, and your boss, all the while arguing with your middle school science class lab partner about something none of them particularly care about.

Zuckerberg's basic gamble was that once everyone saw the benefits of sharing, they wouldn't care about privacy anymore. Yet what he didn't understand was that the two aren't symmetrical. People who don't want to share don't have to- they can sit back and observe. But people burned by an invasion of privacy are not easily convinced that it's all part of our brave new high-tech world, and that they'd better just get used to it.  Google Plus seems to understand that we can have both privacy and sharing so long as privacy comes first.

Nevertheless, I come here not to bury Facebook but to praise it. For an inveterate social network junkie like myself, the ability to share thoughts, photos, and links to such a wide variety of people- an ability facilitated by Facebook- has sincerely changed my life for the better. But even the most narcissistic of us must realize that not everyone we "know" wants or needs to know everything we want to share. Google- whose stated purpose is to organize the world's information- seems to be the first to grasp that information is only valuable if it's sent to people who want it.

I have no plans to stop using Facebook. But given the site's constant game of chicken with users over privacy settings and given the notion that a little competition never hurt anyone, I am hoping Google Plus catches on in a big way.