In part 2 I talked about how despite the privacy abuses of Facebook, people are just too addicted to really leave in masses (especially the young generation). I also made a rather tall claim saying that Google+ will not be a refuge for those who want to find another private social network to replace Facebook. In other words, Google+ will not make Facebook redundant. Let’s find out why.

The problem lies in Circles.

You see, Google+’s circles model is a synthesis of both the public sharing model of Twitter and private sharing model of Facebook. You can scale a post’s exposure linearly from a person, to a group of people, to everyone. As a result, all Public posts are by design sent to Private circles as well. In other words, all of your private friends are included in all of your public conversations.

You might be thinking “Duh”, but think about what that actually entails. If you were a tech enthusiast for example, would you be sharing your excitement about the latest gadget with your non-tech Facebook friends or family who would have no idea what you are talking about? What about a programmer who has a great programming tip, would they share that with their non-technical Facebook friends as well as the public programming community? Probably not, but that’s what Google+ forces us to do. Now of course we aren’t trying to hide things from our friends, just not pollute their streams with irrelevant posts. If they wanted to see those posts as well, there should be a way to be able to. We are multifaceted people with public and private personas. Facebook and Twitter have generally kept those two sides separate and satisfied. However, Google+ tries to consolidate the two but forces our private relationships to be bombarded with posts from our public personas.

So why is that an issue? When someone realizes that they don’t want to pollute the streams of their family or friends with all their public posts, they will try to keep those people separate by reserving Google+ for their public life and use services like Facebook for their private life. So what ends up happening is, people start using Google+ as a place away from their friends on Facebook to post things that are more relevant to their public persona. Twitter used to be that forum, but it’s being downgraded to just a speedy way to spread info (over multiple channels including texts) while Google+ is evolving into a public ecosystem for collaboration, ideas, and also for disseminating news fairly quickly.

This isn’t just speculation, it’s already happening. People like +Christina Trapolino have already stumbled into this problem (http://goo.gl/hTGJO). Think about your own situation, have you felt that you actually want your friends to stay on Facebook so that you can keep Google+ for your public persona and not bother them with posts they may not care about? Of course not everyone has public posts that they don’t want their friends to see and there are times when public people want to share posts with their private circles as well.

You see, Google+ was originally designed for what I call “Casual Public Posters”. This is a big niche of people who want to share things publicly occasionally but not always. Before Google+, there was’t really an option for them. G+ was never meant to overtake Twitter or Facebook, it was designed for a segment of people who they had ignored. If you remember from Part 1, I said Facebook tailors to “Private People”, people who only want to share things privately. And Twitter tailors to “Public People”, people who like to share things publicly. But I think “Casual Public Posters”, people who are mostly private but want to share things publicly occasionally, are the most abundant among the three. I also believe that most people who fall into the Private People category are in reality Causal Public Posters who never had a forum like Google+ to discover that. That’s why there are so many people who before Google+ had never posted anything publicly. Read the comments on Part 1 if you want some proof.

The extreme success of Google+ has already shown that there are many people who like to share things casually with the public. As I mentioned in part one, there are people here who are posting things publicly who have never posted anything public before and definitely have not touched twitter. Google+ has put in the right incentives to subtly make people more public and more willing to engage with the public community.

So what does this all mean? Let’s recap.

1) Google+ is a great place for private people to come and become more comfortable sharing things publicly. These people thought they only wanted to share things privately but realized that they are “Casual Public Posters”, that they like interacting with the public community as well. (outlined in part 1)

2) The design flaw with Circles will cause Google+ to inevitably become a place for Public People and not Private People.

3) This will cause Private People (who now will never realize they are really Causal Public Posters) to never join G+.

4) Although G+ was really designed for Casual Public Posters, this flaw will eventually drive them out as Google+ is used more for public communication.

5) Finally, without Casual Public Posters, Google+ will be dominated by mostly public personas and the genuine down-to-earth people would disappear. In essence replacing Twitter.

So the big problem is, if we don’t fix this flaw more and more people will stick to Facebook to manage their private life and many potentially Causal Public Posters will never realize that they would have loved Google+.

We need to fix this issue to protect these people. They are the majority of Google+ users. They are the people making G+ worthwhile. You won’t find them on Twitter and it would be just plain creepy if you tried to friend them on Facebook. I wrote this 3-part essay to outline the importance of the private social networking side of G+. Without it the Google+ ecosystem would not have been what it is today and without it the Google+ ecosystem will not stay this way tomorrow.

Of course I only point out problems to provide solutions :)

Luckily, there are solutions that allow private people to still become more comfortable with public interaction while giving users the option to separate the private and public posts in a way that is elegant, completely customizable, and removes noise pollution. But I will have to save that for another post.

(originally posted on Google+ here)

In part 1 I talked about how I believe Google has set-up incentives that are actually changing the way we behave online by making us more comfortable sharing things with the public.

Whether or not Google brilliantly designed the system with the intention to make people more public I do not know. What I do know is that Google has succeeded in something Facebook has failed to do.

Facebook Abuse
After seeing the success of a public network like Twitter, Facebook began making advances toward make their users more public. They did this through unintuitive privacy controls and a constantly changing the system with the goal of squeezing as many details about you to the public as they could.

Of course people retaliated and now they have a tarnished reputation on privacy.

The Subtle Addiction
Even though people feel they are being and have been abused by Facebook, most won’t leave, and here is why. They are addicted. You can’t blame them; Facebook has designed the system to be addictive. If you look closely, all throughout Facebook you will find subtle tricks designed to keep you hooked. There are many ways Facebook does this, here are just a few.

When you visit a friend’s or a stranger’s profile page, what the first thing you look at? Probably the profile photo. And what’s the second? Whether you want to admit it or not, a lot of the time that is the friend count. Facebook has capitalized on the fact that most people like to boil down popularity to a single number and placed that number just pixels away from the photo fueling social competition.

Have you noticed that Facebook let’s you know every time your friends make friends? Why? We all make friends, its a fact of life, but why tell me every time a friend of mine makes a new friend? Well, that’s also to feed social competition. When we are told our friends are making friends, we want to also make friends. We get a little jealous, and want to get that friend count up too. Then our friends see that we made new friends and feel the same way, creating an endless cycle of competition.

What about “The Wall”, have you ever wondered why it was created? When you think about it, its kind of strange right? In real life there is no such thing as a wall. We don’t go walking around in public with a wall on our backs that our friends can leave random non-urgent messages on. I don’t know where “The Wall” originated from but the person who created the concept of this virtual public wall was a social genius. You see, in the ancient days when you were messaged/emailed privately no one could see how often you were being messaged and thus didn’t really have a measurable way to calculate your popularity. With the creation of the wall, what used to be private and unknown was now out in the open, giving people a way to judge each other’s popularity. Let’s face it, we always want to be the popular kid, even the popular kids think someone else is even more popular. Whether they realized it or not, with the creation of the wall, people began competing for messages.

Remember way back in the day when Facebook had a counter for the number of wall posts you had? Yep, boy did that cause some chaos. There used to be public wall to wall chat’s that would last ages, random wall posts inciting reply posts, and other fake attempts to increase the post count. Things got more complicated when you could start commenting on wall posts. “Do I reply in a comment or reply in a wall post? Hmmm.” This is, in my opinion, the ultimate tool for social competition. So why is Facebook trying to incite competition? The more social competition, the more you will compete, and more you will need to come back to the site.

There are many more tricks they use to keep you hooked. Like how the new profile design places friends’ photos in the profile page to increase the chance of you clicking through their photos (and viewing the add in the photo window). Or how recently Facebook started placing the chat in the right side in order to increase the chance of you initiating a chat, which will definitely ensure you keep Facebook open. There are more that deserve their own articles.

Are you angry with Facebook? You shouldn’t be. They are a company and by definition they need to do what is necessary to make money. And for Facebook, and other websites, that means trying to keep you on the site as long as possible so that you can be exposed to the maximum number of ads. More social competition, more time you will spend on the site.

In the end, even though Facebook abuses its users by violating their privacy, in the end the majority of them won’t leave because they are addicted.

But that’s not the bad news.

The bad news is that Google+ is not a place they can go to for refuge. Google+ has a flaw in its design that will, in the end, cause it to become an outlet for public personalities and not private relationships like Facebook. What is that flaw? Well, for that you will have to wait for part 3 of The Big Picture.

(originally posted on Google+ here)

Here is an interesting thought, by giving people more options to be private are we making them more comfortable sharing things with the public?

To answer this question we need to look at Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has trained people to share things with a private circle of connections. While Twitter has trained people to share things publicly, even on occasions where it would be better not to. I have noticed that most people on Twitter are the kinds of people who want to say something in public while most people on Facebook just want to share things with their friends and nothing more. Every time I find a Facebook friend on Twitter its like, “Oh hey, what a nice surprise to see you all the way here. You care about venturing beyond your friend circle too?” Basically the kind of person who loves Facebook is generally speaking not the kind of person you will find tweeting about the latest political news or tech story. OK, so there are two types of people then right? Let’s call them “public people” and “private people”. Let’s also keep in mind that “Public people” have private lives as well. This means that you will find “Public People” on both Facebook and Twitter while you will probably only find “Private People” on Facebook.

Now, a lot of people have been flocking to Google+ for multiple reasons. The most common ones are:
1) They are tired of Facebook’s privacy problems. (running away)
2) They are excited about using Google+ Circles to better control their privacy. (running to)

Either way, these users are generally people who are looking for an alternative for a private networking experience like Facebook. That means when they come to Google+ they are expecting it to behave somewhat like Facebook. Remember when Google+ was revealed? Remember how many times people called it the Facebook killer and how rarely it was compared to Twitter? People naturally compared it to Facebook because the Circles concept spoke to all the frustrated users from Facebook and they assumed it was another private network.

So remember, people are expecting to use it like a private network. And so they start by putting people into circles. Close friends go here. Acquaintances go there. Famous people, like Tom Anderson, can go in that circle. And so on.

Now here is the moment when the Private Person starts to become a Public Person. When they want to share something with their friends and acquaintances, they may bump into the following scenario.

“OK, let me just share this with ‘My Circles’.”
“Wait a minute, Tom Anderson is technically part of ‘My Circles’ but he’s not an acquaintance so I can’t do that.”

Now, they can choose to just share with their friends and acquaintances circles or do this:

“Well, if I am willing to share this with my acquaintances, who I barely know, I might as well let other G+ users see my post. I might meet some cool folks and maybe even Tom Anderson.” They select ‘Public’ and click share.

In summary, someone who has never shared anything publicly is more likely to do so on Google+. Google has set up the Circles, to make it extremely easy for people to share things publicly, the same people who would have not shared anything publicly on Facebook or Twitter.

I think Google+ has succeeded in something Facebook has struggled to do, which is make people more public. Nevertheless, its success in this realm will ultimately determine its fate as a public network, overthrowing Twitter instead. How? Well, for that, you will have to wait for Part 2 :)

(originally posted on Google+ here)