2 Things I Need To Understand In Google Plus
In my eyes, Google+ and Facebook are way more similar than you could expect. After playing around for a couple of hours, to me Google+ is “Facebook with a twist”. Circles is a nice twist, hangout is kind of chatroulette among friends and so on. But at first sight, there are 2 major differences between Google+ and Facebook that I don’t really understand.
A) Asynchronous Adding
Unlike Facebook, you can add people without their permission. On Facebook, a relation is always mutual. I have to permit someone to add me. On Twitter, it is different. I can follow someone without him following me. On Google plus, it is more complicated. I can follow someone’s public updates and add the user to my circles without their permission – and therefore publish into their streams (as far as I understood it).
Probably this just makes it easier to get a network going – and the more friends you have (and just added without their permission), the more lively your stream is from the very beginning. But you can even add people that are not on Google+, and the chat keeps showing me my parents as available – the two people on earth from which I can absolutely guarantee they will not be in this network. And I remember how many people were really upset about being part of Google Buzz without really knowing it, so… I wonder what Google considered a take-away from this lesson.
B) No Fanpage Product
I don’t know why Google wouldn’t start with a fanpage-like product. Celebrities and brands bring great content into a network, and were one of the drivers to growth of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, so we could say to modern social networks in general. Therefore, I have problems to understand this. Fanpages as such are asynchronous in the above mentioned sense, so with adding the way Google+ offers it, any company could go in and just add a million people. Which would be very strange. Keen to see if Google cooked up a special solution for this.
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