I’ve been using Google+ a bit more frequently over the past few weeks. Of course, if you read this blog you wouldn’t have noticed. I know this because referral traffic to the site from Google+ is virtually non-existent. I find the whole narrative around Google+ extremely strange, so I’d like to get some of my random thoughts out in the open to see if anyone can add some insight.

First, viewed purely on its own merit Google+ is a fantastic social network. The interface manages to bring together all the best parts of Twitter (short updates, follow model), Facebook (pulling in short article summaries, good conversation mechanism), App.net (longer updates), and Flickr (beautiful photos). At the same time, it leaves out most of the annoying parts of those respective networks (like advertising, lack of context, and the inability to carry on a conversation). It’s my favorite social network to post links to, because I can add short commentaries or pull quotes from the article, and it automatically pulls in important metadata (sure, Twitter Cards also do this, but those aren’t supported by all sites and in all apps).

Second, Google+ feels like a parallel universe. As an active user of both Twitter and Google+, my experience has been that there is almost no overlap between the people who use those two networks on a daily basis. Further, users behave very, very differently depending on the platform. Twitter users comment more about Apple (well, the ones I follow anyway…), whereas Google+ content is much more slanted towards Google/Android news (not surprising, of course). Twitter users are more angry and combative, whereas Google+ is more like summer camp. Twitter feels frantic, Google+ feels relaxed.

And the weirdest thing — to keep beating a dead horse — is that the users on each network seem blissfully unaware of each other. It’s like going to a farmers market full of hipsters and young parents. Both are present, but it’s as if each group is invisible to the other1.

Getting actual numbers to compare the size of the networks is a fool’s errand. I don’t think we’ll ever really know how big each of the major networks are. But one widely reported statistic says that Google+ is now the #2 social network globally, behind Facebook but ahead of Twitter.

And this is why I’m confused. I think Google+ has a superior product in terms of its features. There appears to be lots of traffic on the network, and people are still reasonably nice to each other when they interact. And yet there’s no way I can even begin to think about moving off Twitter, because most of the people that I interact with and want to keep up with are on Twitter and not on Google+.

Does it mean that Google did too little, too late? Does it mean that the major social networks are all syphoning off their own unique customers that will never overlap? Is Google inflating the numbers artificially and it is, in fact, dying a slow death? Or, most disturbingly, does it mean that having a superior product doesn’t matter as much as strong network effects?

But then again, perhaps Google+ is not competing with who we assume they’re competing with. In line with Google’s vision to organize the world’s information, the focus on Google+ seems to be shifting to content more than relationships. And as Luke Kingma points out, the foundation of the next great social network will probably be the quality and relevance of the content, not the person who posted it. In that sense, I wonder if Google is more interested in being Reddit2 (the front page of the Internet), than it is in being a Facebook/Twitter clone (what your friends are up to).

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… on Google+, of course.

---

1. By the way, in this analogy Twitter would be the hipsters and Google+ would be the young parents. ↩

2. Must-read article: Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World ↩

By now most people have read Paul Miller’s I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The article is certainly deserving of all the attention it received back in May. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps a gloating, holier-than-thou account of the virtues of going on an internet sabbatical to “find yourself”. But that’s not what this is. It’s a raw, often sad, always authentic account of a year that didn’t go at all as expected.

There is much to discuss and analyze in Paul’s experience, but I’d like to focus on this particular paragraph:

What I do know is that I can’t blame the internet, or any circumstance, for my problems. I have many of the same priorities I had before I left the internet: family, friends, work, learning. And I have no guarantee I’ll stick with them when I get back on the internet — I probably won’t, to be honest. But at least I’ll know that it’s not the internet’s fault. I’ll know who’s responsible, and who can fix it.

Paul touches on a really important point here. Over the past few years we’ve increasingly started to blame the internet or technology whenever we feel like we’re failing at being human beings. It all started with Nicholas Carr’s famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, a theme that is carried through in Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants.

These (and other) authors make great arguments, and I don’t doubt the validity of their assertions. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far away from the importance of personal responsibility. It has just become too easy to play the victim and blame technology for our own inability to resist it. Some people feel so powerless against the relentless pull of technology that they pay hundreds of dollars to go to what is essentially rehab for technology addicts. NPR tells the story in the article At Tech-Free Camps, People Pay Hundreds To Unplug:

Digital Detox co-founder Levi Felix attributes the high demand for tech-free retreats to a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of technology in our everyday lives. “People are feeling like something’s not right here,” he says.

With no iPhones or computers to distract them, campers at Camp Grounded participated in “playshops,” featuring yoga, laughing contests and writing sessions.

What the hell? “Laughing contests”? Isn’t that just called “going out to dinner with friends”? Sure, many of us find it hard to unplug, and we end up spending a lot of our time alone together1, but we can’t throw our hands in the air and blame inanimate objects for our woes. We have to take responsibility for our actions and realize that we have nothing to fear: our devices won’t become self-aware and attack us if we turn them off every once in a while.

I think Theodore Rooseveldt said it best:

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Image source: Jean Jullien

---

1. This is a great book. Well worth your time. ↩

Graeme Wood takes a fascinating look at The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management for New York Magazine:

Whoever he was, it seemed that “Xander Fields” had built a whole Potemkin universe of positive-press websites that amplified made-up praise, often by made-up people, for a handful of rich folks with messy online reputations. I was now deep down in a ­rabbit hole but hadn’t yet landed with a ­satisfying thud. Who was “Xander Fields”?

I love reading stories like this. Consider this your required weekend reading.

One of the reasons why Twitter works so well is its high information density, enforced by the 140 character limit. All the information is immediately visible in your stream. There is no need to read a subject line and then click through to the content, as with email. In fact, there’s very little clicking required at all — only scrolling. Sure, you can click on a link or a photo if you’re motivated to do so, but only if you believe what you’ll find at the other end of the link is going to be interesting to you. Otherwise, all you have to do is just keep scrolling.

Instagram’s core strength relied on a similar principle. It was just photos you could scroll through. Nothing more, nothing less. You could open Instagram for 10 seconds and check what’s new, or for 10 minutes and get lost in the universe of people’s lives. And you always knew what you were going to get: an endless stream of photos. Just keep scrolling.

Well, not any more. This week, co-founder Kevin Systrom introduced the addition of video content on Instagram, saying:

Some moments, however, need more than a static image to come to life. Until now these stories have been missing from Instagram.

Just like that, Instagram gave up their biggest strength: the simple consistency of giving users exactly what they expect every time they open the app. Now there’s no way to tell if you’re going to see a photo or a video. When you do happen upon a video, you have to stop scrolling and wait for it to load. And if you happen to check Instagram during a meeting and forget to turn the sound off… well, awkward.

This is such a change in direction from the company Kevin Systrom described in 2010 in an answer to the question What is the genesis of Instagram? (my emphasis added):

We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas. We spent 1 week prototyping a version that focused solely on photos. It was pretty awful. So we went back to creating a native version of Burbn. We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram.

They wanted to be really good at one thing… The first version was cluttered and overrun with features… They basically cut everything, and what remained was Instagram… Until this week. Suddenly, the app is cluttered and overrun with features again.

The introduction of video on Instagram is clearly a move to compete with Vine, the 6-second video service from Twitter. What’s ironic is that chasing after competitor features is exactly how the photo service Hipstamatic lost their own battle against Instagram. From No Filter: How Instagram Caused Hipstamatic To Lose Focus And Gamble On Social:

For a startup that prides itself on the originality and creativity of its users, Hipstamatic spent much of 2012 chasing many other companies’ ideas. “I can honestly say that there was a lot of talk about Instagram, Path, and social,” [Hipstamatic CEO Lucas] Buick says of his company’s internal discussions. “Ultimately, that’s what shifted our focus away from who we really are.”

Only time will tell if Instagram’s introduction of video represents a similar mistake. But it’s worth noting that they have now introduced a significant amount of what Kris Gale calls complexity cost:

Complexity cost is the debt you accrue by complicating features or technology in order to solve problems. An application that does twenty things is more difficult to refactor than an application that does one thing, so changes to its code will take longer. Sometimes complexity is a necessary cost, but only organizations that fully internalize the concept can hope to prevent runaway spending in this area.

I still love Instagram, but I worry that it’s just the latest example of our obsession to add as many features as possible to products out of fear of losing traction. Instead of lateral shifts into additional functionality, I’d like to see more companies double down on the features they already have, and continuously improve the experience around those features.

In Small Ads Dushko Petrovich turns our attention away from Facebook and Google to take a philosophical journey through those small, weird, completely non-targeted block-ads that appear in magazines:

At first you think these little rectangles are amusing because they offer monogrammed sweaters and self-publishing opportunities—things that are undoubtedly funny, in a sad, Skymall sort of way. But sometimes the funny sadness goes deeper than that, like the sadness of “unique diamond fish jewelry” for $15,000. And then sometimes you are plunged so deep into these ads, you wish there was a German word, or school of social thought, that could sufficiently describe the experience.

There might not be a German word for the experience, but Dushko’s troubled thoughts on the matter is entertainment enough.

Cliff Watson in Teens aren’t abandoning “social.” They’re just using the word correctly:

What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.

You know what kids call that? School. For kids who still go to school, Facebook is boring. If one of their friends does something amazing or amazingly dumb, they’ll find out within five minutes. If they’re not friends with that person, it will take 15 minutes.

That’s interesting, but very different from the sentiment in two other recent articles on how teens use Facebook. First, from the fascinating and scary What Really Happens On A Teen Girl’s iPhone, in which a teenage girl describes Facebook more like a prison than anything else:

“I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just … because,” Casey says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.” […]

“If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100,” she explains. “Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

And then from Slate’s Teenagers Hate Facebook, but They’re Not Logging Off, an article on a recent Pew study on social media usage among teens1:

“I think Facebook can be fun, but also it’s drama central,” one 14-year-old girl said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a ‘like,’ that they wouldn’t say in real life.” Said another, “It’s so competitive to get the most likes [on a Facebook picture]. It’s like your social position.” Ninety-four percent of American teenagers maintain a Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. “Honestly,” one 15-year-old girl told Pew, “I’m on it constantly but I hate it so much.”

Whether Facebook is boring, a prison, or some bizarre combination of both, it seems that reports of its decline among teens have been a little premature. I don’t think “a trap you can’t escape” is a good way to ensure continued user growth and satisfaction, but that seems to be the position Facebook finds itself in at the moment.

I half-joked this morning (on Facebook, of course) that I’d like to start RealLifeBook, a site where you don’t leave out the ugly pictures and difficult parts of your life. I wonder if that’s part of the problem that makes Facebook feel like a place you hate but can’t leave — it looks like everyone else is always happy, so you can’t be yourself, and you get caught up in this endless cycle of trying to out-happy your friends to get the most likes.

Damn, do we have to rethink a few things about how the web works…

---

1. danah boyd also posted some thoughts on the Pew report, and as always it’s very insightful. ↩

Simon Kuper wrote a very interesting counter-argument to the common assertion that social media is making us a post-literate society. From his piece How social media improved writing:

Before the internet, only professional writers wrote. […] Email kicked off an unprecedented expansion in writing. We’re now in the most literate age in history. I remember in 2003 asking someone, “What’s a blog?” By 2006, the analysis firm NM Incite had identified 36 million blogs worldwide; five years later, there were 173 million. Use of online social media rises every month. In fact, writing is overtaking speech as the most common form of interaction.

The fact that we write to each other more than we talk to each other comes with its own set of problems, of course, but Simon argues that all this texting and IM’ing and status updating is turning us into better writers. And he makes a lot of sense.

Nick Bilton in Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind, an article on the growing (not just hipster any more?) trend to step away from technology every once in a while:

As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels.

The “phone stack” is becoming increasingly popular as a way to force people to talk to each other over dinner. Sad, but necessary.

Photo credit: Roo Reynolds on Flickr

Nicholas Carr compares two recent Facebook ad campaigns in Home away from Home, and comes to the following conclusion:

What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself.

“Our place on this earth”? Doorbells? Bridges? What a load of crap! The earth sucks! Things are boring! People are ugly! Go online and stay online! Chairs, mawkishly celebrated in “The Things That Connect Us” as bulwarks against the meaninglessness of the universe, as concrete means of connection and hence liberation, become in “Dinner” instruments of torture. They trap us in the distasteful world of the flesh, the hell of other people.

It’s an astute observation not just about Facebook, but about advertising in general. How many of the ads we celebrate — yes, even the new iPhone 5 ad — are just fleeting attempts to play on emotions that we find appealing in that instant? The Facebook ad pulls away the curtain to reveal in stark fashion that there is often no thought put into a larger story, an honest portrayal of what a product is and does.

All of this reminds me of the “Bring the love back” campaign from a few years ago:

Sadly — but perhaps as a fitting metaphor for the advertising industry — the bringtheloveback.com domain doesn’t exist any more.

Olga Khazan covers a new UNICEF ad campaign in UNICEF Tells Slacktivists: Give Money, Not Facebook Likes:

But one thing clicking “like” doesn’t do is, say, get malaria nets to African villages or boost funding for charity groups. And now that Facebook is nearly 9 years old and Twitter is 7, we’re seeing the inevitable backlash against social-media “slacktivism.”

The print component of the campaign is shown below. It’s a bold, welcome move from UNICEF.