Plus

Well, here we go again: Google is launching a Facebook killer. (If you need proof, just look at the fact that the launch of a limited public beta of Google Plus was all over the nightly news on Tuesday.) And this time, it won’t be a big bucket of used WTF, like Google Wave, or a sudden revelation that Google owns your privacy like Google Buzz. This one will be different, honest.

Actually, it may be.

It looks like Google is going to school on what Diaspora does (and what Facebook seems intent on preventing) – providing a means to granulate your social interactions. Not all-or-nothing, but discreet slices of your contacts, so you can parse out what your relatives see versus what your co-workers see versus what your actual friends at work see versus what your cool cousins see versus what your gang of reprobates back East can see…and just to minimize the suck, they have none other than Andy Hertzfeld on the interface design. If you’ve ever used a Macintosh, you’re using a Hertzfeld creation, so this should give you some idea how much better the UI will be compared to, say, Google Wave.*

The other competition, of course, is Twitter. Sure, Twitter doesn’t offer a lot of granularity, but it offers something better: completely pseudonymous accounts, free of charge, allowing you to have one or two or five (in my case) or as many as it takes for you to keep the aspects of your lives separate. Sure, a bit of a PITA, but all the official Twitter clients support multiple accounts. Easy peasy. To me, that’s why Twitter has basically displaced Facebook: it’s simple, it’s easy to use from PC or phone app or text message, and most of all, it’s a dumb network. Dumb networks are important, because they let you send anything and put the intelligence at the ends of the communication. Putting the brains in the network second-guesses what the users at the ends actually want.

That pseudonymity is probably why I won’t go very far with Google+ (although that ridiculous name is worse) – it ties into your existing Google account, which just leads to one more node in the data farm. Dave Winer has it right: just like Microsoft had to tie everything back into Windows, Google has to tie everything back into search – and more importantly, into their advertising mechanism. But hey, to all accounts, it looks good and works fast. Which is a step in the right direction.

The real problem is this: how reliable are the privacy controls? How deep is Google getting into your life? Because if there are limits and control over it, that might still make it a better option than Facebook’s oopsy-daisy approach (which reared its head again this week, possibly leading to my permanent departure). The problem of social networking is that you have to give up some of your data to make it work – and the people in the middle get hold of it, too.

Actually, though, almost all my friends have iPhones now. Maybe it’ll just be all iMessage all the time…

* Back in DC, a “wave” is the sudden feeling you get when you urgently need to take a dump. Actually, in retrospect, Wave was the perfect name for that product.

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