Countless articles by the mass media call Google+ an attempt to be a Facebook killer. Please journalists, quit calling Google+ a Facebook killer. It just clouds the issues. It’s such a shallow bit of journalism to present Google vs. Facebook as a headline.
Google+ is a new approach to social networking. It has some elements from Facebook and some from Twitter. Someone could choose to use Google+ as a Facebook replacement, or perhaps a Twitter replacement, but using Google+ most effectively requires looking at social media with a new pair of glasses. A good journalist studies the subject a bit rather than just spewing forth words or taking the easy path to getting an article out quickly. Google+ is as much a competitor to Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and other social networks over the long term as it is to Facebook.
By providing a flexible way to group people for both creating and consuming content, Google+ introduces a new foundational architecture. In addition, the culture that is so much an integral part of a social network is so different from Facebook that when I see the typical Google/Facebook comparison in an article, my opinion of the author tends to take a step in the wrong direction and I immediately start questioning whether the author has even spent much time in Google+ first hand.
These comparisons cause harm too. Small business owners may assume that they can safely ignore Google+ like many do Facebook, or that they can view the product as a “personal” environment as opposed to a “business” one. That’s not a safe assumption. It’s more accurate to state that if you have a LinkedIn account, you should have a Google+ account. Google+ is not only not limited to “personal” connections, it actively and aggressively provides functionality so that you easily segregate your “personal” and “business” communications on the platform.
Google+ significantly alters the social dynamic. It combines many of the best features of several different platforms. Like Twitter, you can circle someone in order to follow their public posts. They receive notice, and can either choose to circle you back or not, but if they don’t, it’s not considered a social faux pas that you chose to follow them. On Facebook, you’d damage any potential relationship with someone and you have to be confident that you know them well enough before you friend them. Likewise on LinkedIn. If you own a company and someone did business with your company, do you know them? Should you feel free to invite them to connect? It’s unclear. On Google+ you can choose to circle all your clients without fear of repercussions. It’s a more convenient and more effective way to engage people with low barriers. You aren’t forced into a two way approval process, yet you can choose to engage in one if you so desire. It’s flexible.
This flexibility in the architecture and the culture of the social network is at the heart of why the comparisons to Facebook are spurious and disingenuous. It’s also why people who write that there’s nothing in Google+ that Facebook couldn’t emulate if they so desired are very much wrong about that. Facebook could not remove it’s two way approval process without massive user rejection. There’s no simple way for Facebook to become the open discussion forum that Google+ is engineered to become. These factors just can’t be ignored in any cogent discussion of Google+ and calling Google+ a Facebook killer does a disservice to readers who truly want to understand the product.
