Why Are My Friends Not on Google+

I really wanted to put a question mark at the end of the title. But you see how weird any punctuation mark looks after that + in Google+! And no, that is definitely not one of the reasons why my friends are not on Google+. Let's stop making fun and dive into my assessment of why Facebook fans (all of my friends belong to this category) are still sticking to it. I thought of writing this blog post while answering a question posted to a Google+ community about Google+ itself. While answering that question, I realised that it needed a bigger space and more audience than the members of that particular Google+ community and hence this blog post.

The facebook (without the 'The')

When I joined Facebook along with a few friends of mine, I quickly realised that it was a much more engaging platform than Orkut (the social network I and my friends were using prior to Facebook). The 'Wall' was such a great place to come to know what my friends were up to. It seemed a little weird at first that whatever I wrote on a friend's wall was instantly visible to everyone (which would not have been the case had I written it in the scrapebook in Orkut). But then, this was the most engaging thing in the social network. This is what brought friends closer and I just had to read through my wall to come to know whatever my friends were doing. The problem here, was that everyone here was my friend, an equal. They all got to see what I did. Nothing hidden from anybody. Moreover, there were people who were my Facebook friends while I wouldn't really have talked to them in real life. I had no way to share selectively. My life was laid bare to everyone and anyone who managed to become my Facebook friend.

Enter Google+

Google+ was built around a novel idea of sharing selectively. And to me, this made a lot more sense. I did not want my family members to see what jokes I'm sharing with my friends on Facebook. I never added my family to my friends' list on Facebook, by the way. A bigger problem was the sharing with people whom I'd not normally tell something in real life. But had to tell them things just because they were my Facebook friends. So privacy sceptics like me really liked how Google+ handled this problem by introducing the concept of circles. It just made so much more sense to share with just the right set of people. But then they had other design decisions to make.

I few questions that they might have had to face during design (according to me) are - Whom do I get to add to my circles? Do I send a friend request and wait for that person to respond? Or should I just add a person directly, and start sharing stuff with them? Well, in any case, I'm not sure if the person would want to add me to one of their circles. This leads to another problem - What do I see in my stream? Obviously whatever someone else has shared with me. But what if I'm a rockstar and have a million fans wanting to share stuff with me? My total social network experience would be ruined and I would not be able to see posts by those who matter to me. The solution that Google came up with, was to have my stream filled with posts only from people who are in my circles (plus, they have shared something publicly or with me).

A big plus of this model was that it helped me share just the right information with the right people. Moreover, I could add anyone to my circles without asking for their explicit permission. This would cause them no problems as they are not sharing anything with me. Because of this, some people even called Google+ Twitter on steroids, in its early days. Yes, Google+ had taken the form of sharing prevalent on Twitter to a whole new level. Microblogging was the term given to the form of sharing on Twitter. You could share something and people could follow you to subscribe to those hundred and something character long snippets. Google+ had a much bigger playing field and you could share a lot more here. People could add you to their circles and your posts (shared publicly, or shared with them) would start showing up in their streams. I thought that Google+ would attract users from both the spheres - Twitter and Facebook. But then, if you've noticed, the title of this post reads Why are my friends not on Google+ This means that they still like Facebook. What could be the possible reasons behind that?

Facebook strikes back!
Soon after Google+ was launched and with all the hype created around it with membership by invitation only, there was a sudden dip in the number of Facebook users. A large number of users started hanging around Google+, the new cool kid in town. But Facebook fought back. They immediately and quietly implemented a few of the cool features of Google+. They now allow you to share stuff with groups of friends. The concept of creating groups of friends was already there but you could not share selectively earlier. Facebook even volunteered and made a few groups for you intelligently by looking at common traits between you and your friends. They also allowed people to subscribe to public posts by others without having to send a friend request. These two things kept the migration in check. A large percentage of the existing users had never really bothered about privacy in the first place. But the fact that they were given all these options made them feel at ease. At least, it solved the problems that I had with Facebook.

Why my friends are not on Google+
According to me, the reason why my friends are not on Google+ yet is that they do not find any interesting feature here that they should bother to switch social networks. Facebook is good enough to occupy most of their time (spent in reading updates from friends, and more recently, from friends of friends too!). And the reason why I'm here on Google+ is that one fine day I realised that I wasted that black day just going through updates from my friends (and their friends, thanks to the new privacy settings) on Facebook. Instead, had I spent that much time on Google+, I'd have learnt some new things here. I follow some interesting people/pages here and come to know a lot about the latest in technology, science, photography, et cetera.

To sum up...
Google+ has some other novel features that can help bring people together like hangouts, events and communities. I believe these features can really bring like minded people together and encourage collaboration on a scale never seen or heard of. Famous people like +Trey Ratcliff and +John Mueller have been hosting public hangouts regularly. I do not doubt that Facebook can catch up with novel, engaging ideas of their own. I also love facebook for the fact that their logo can be created very easily with some CSS. It's just that I want my friends to come and see what is social networking according to Google and not miss out on the fun.