pavyedav | boredom and inherent curiosity, in one

My first non-wireless related post. Hopefully it’s more interesting and accessible.

Now that Google+ has stormed onto the social networking scene, it has raised an interesting question about when consumer overload will occur. At this point, I check Twitter (concise recap of all news and thoughts) and Facebook (begrudgingly), but I still don’t have it instilled in my mind to check and actively use Google+, despite being logged onto GMail for much of the day. 

I think Google+ has some great features, such as Circles and Hangouts, but my biggest issue with it is that the direction they are going seems to require you to restart your entire social scene. We did the exact same thing with Facebook six years ago, where you automatically wanted to friend someone after meeting them. But now, Facebook isn’t interesting at all, so Google+ isn’t interesting either. Maybe I’ve reached a saturation point with social media, and I’m just a huge skeptic. But for the sake of argument, let’s just say everyone feels like this.

That type of phenomenon (“Let me add you on Google+”) no longer is appealing because it requires too much effort, especially given that a perfectly good system that already has your established social network is sitting right there. Listen, I really dislike Facebook. I think the chat client is irritating, many of its features are obtrusive, and its best quality is that it has all of our pictures easily accessible. Everything else is awful. But everyone uses it, so in order to stay relevant, I need to use it too.

Regarding Twitter, I wasn’t exactly sure how to use it or what to do with it at the beginning, but over time I came to really enjoy its functions, namely that I can get all my news, friends’ thoughts, and celebrity trash in a very concise five minute session.

Having said that, I use both for different purposes, so the question is: where does Google+ fit into this? I believe the only area where Google+ can flourish is with Circles (and Hangouts, but that’s more of an advanced feature). Google+ should not have the scope that Facebook and Twitter have. Its greatest feature is that you can categorize your friends and family into groups, so that communication is efficient and easy, without having anything (or anyone) unnecessary. I will access Google+ when I want to send only certain people something (most likely my close friends, family, co-workers), and where e-mail could be too unnecessarily personal and link people who may not necessarily want to be linked (in a “reply all” situation). Google+ makes that very easy right now, so I think the company should highlight this exclusively when discussing its features. Instead of making people want to add you for the sake of having more people in their Circles, Google’s marketing team should focus on how it isn’t like Facebook. Personal critical mass is not what they’re trying to achieve. Quality posts and discussions among people and their close acquaintances (rather than that random person you met on campus while waiting in line at the bookstore) will lead to a better human experience. They shouldn’t try to make it the next “Facebook killer.” Instead, they should focus on how it can be “personal,” when going to meet them for coffee isn’t an option. I think this will increase its value to the consumer tremendously.

Let’s see whether they get this right.