When Google Wave came out and I was given an invite by kind friends who tolerate my perverse desire to try out Cool New Shit, I paid it forward by raffling my own parcel of invites off on Twitter with a haiku and limerick contest. What goes around comes around, it seems: after I went all passive-aggressive on my negligent Googler friend who really should have gotten me in on this Cool New Shit, two other friends had sent me an invite. Bless!
Whoever says Google Plus is a lot like Facebook isn't wrong. 'Sparks' is a stupid buzzword. I haven't yet tried 'Hangout', the casual group video chat thing, but considering that my friends all live in very diverse timezones I don't see this becoming a part of my life. And the previously introduced +1 button, Google's answer to the Facebook Like button, is still a me-too response to something I always considered kind of dumb.
But Google Plus looks nice, works well, is ubiquitous and unobtrusive at once, and there's one thing, one central thing, that it gets super duper right about social networking.
All the major social networks, from LiveJournal to Facebook to Twitter, support Lists or Groups and they're all kind of not very awesome. It's a chore to manage who you put in those groups, and if you want to see the activity in a particular list or share something only with one list and not another, expect to click and double-check a whole lot more.
While 'Circles' seems like another stupid buzzword, this is the part that Google has got really, really right.
Organizing your contacts into Circles is quick, intuitive and fun. Let me say that again, to make sure you don't read any unintended irony into it: organizing your contacts is fun. Have some Kool-Aid.
Circles are central to Google Plus, not tacked-on afterthoughts like Lists and Groups are pretty much everywhere else. They give you security and privacy, but they don't feel like a tool for keeping secrets. You're encouraged to think about what your friends and contacts have in common with you, with each other, what you're interested in sharing with them. Circles even comes pre-populated with sensible Circles for you to use: Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following, but you can add as many as you like.
There's stuff I deliberately don't share on Facebook because I've got some coworkers on there, or that I don't post to Twitter or LiveJournal because it's too public or because managing the privacy levels on those is a chore I never got into. When I see something interesting on Google Reader I'll sometimes hit the Share button for my handful of followers, or I'll excerpt it and post it to my blog, to then be autoposted across my myriad social networks. Or sometimes I'll e-mail it to either my nearest friends or my family.
We're all constantly thinking about what we share with whom, not just because we have secrets to keep, but also because you want to share some things specifically with those people with whom you share those particular common interests. With Circles, Google has figured out the best currently existing way to make those decisions natural and easy in social networking.
In Google Plus, it's almost no effort to share or post something in public, with a Circle, with a single person or with five specific individuals. It's baked in; as elemental as the To: field in e-mail. I always know who I'm sharing it with, and that doesn't just help me keep my dirtly little secrets: it also frees me to geek out about stuff that probably the majority of my friends and acquaintances don't care about because I can share it specifically with the people who do.
Google Plus learned from Wave and Buzz. From the former it learned that people have to be able to understand what it's for right from the get-go; from the latter it learned that people, you know, value their privacy. From both, it learned that nobody wants to be the first guy with a fax machine, so Plus is rolling out across Google's holdings, and will integrate more and more of their services. Bring it, Big G.
Still, those buzzwords. Circles? I mean, it fits, and the UX is symbiotic with the word, but still. Actually, it probably helps best to imagine Circles as a social Venn diagram with you in the center.
And as we know, Venn diagrams are super cute.
- Alex Vance
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