It will be interesting to see if the world can handle one more social network, even if it does have an interesting new trick. Google Plus (or +) is in Beta and everyone is calling it "Google's Facebook". It differs from FB in many ways though, not the least of which is that it's based, like Twitter, on asynchronous friendships... AKA someone can be your friend without you being theirs. So in that case it would appear to be less private, although there is a reason they designed it like that which I'll get to in one minute. Besides, with all the dozens of privacy changes Facebook has implemented, and the complexity of their current privacy system, do you really know who the heck can see your stuff anyhow?
The big novel feature of Google+, which is currently invitation-only, is the concept of "circles". Just as you have circles of friends in the real world, your Google+ friends can be arranged in circles that keep the "walls" in place so that the topics and conversations in one circle don't overlap with another. This I find to be a very interesting feature, and was created to directly address what has come to be called the Facebook mom problem:
"Facebook started out as a network for college students, and when it opened to everyone, all the sudden lots of people had a mom problem. That is, all the sudden your mom could see all those photos of you doing kegstands and status updates asking if anyone knew where to score weed in Cambridge on a Thursday morning."
Circles lets you have distinct and separate groups of friends that do not overlap. If half your friends don't really care about your backpacking hobby, just make a circle for that and plop the appropriate people into it. And then post your backpacking posts to that circle only. Same thing for your work friends. Of course, a given person can be in multiple circles just like in real life. Many tech people are saying that when Facebook was created, nobody really knew what the heck social networks would be used for, and that Google+ was designed with all those lessons learned in place from the start.
It remains to be seen if Google+ will take off, but I think it's got some very interesting design innovations. And don't discount it just because Facebook has 700 million users. Why? Because Google has over one billion users and something tells me it's going to be hard to NOT be in Google+ before too long. They're simply going to weave it into their search page and you are going to start getting status updates from your friends even though you may not even be a member. You may have already seen little "+1" icons popping up all over the web...these are the Google+ version of "likes". They're already reeling us in. Tricky, those Google guys are.
Incidentally, Google+ was designed by one of the most brilliant people in personal computer history, another Apple Computer alumni from the early Mac dev team, Andy Hertzfeld. Andy was the lead software engineer for the first Macintosh OS. No mental slouch, this guy. He's well known as an innovative and careful thinker in the realm of the user interface and I think most people will be shocked when they see just how un-Google-like the Google+ interface looks and acts.
So we'll see...keep an open mind. As a wise man once said, "the only constant is change"
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