It's been interesting to hear some
Facebook supporters defend Facebook by slamming Circles, insisting that they discourage sharing and are thus a bad thing. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Facebook has their own implementation of this concept even if they have buried it increasingly deep in their
UI over time. More apropos though is the concept that
Teresa Zazenski came up with as part of an online conversation in the comments section of the post linked to her name. She pointed out that people may in fact be MORE likely to share if they have Circles. The reasoning is that most of us self censor if we have something to share that isn't apropos to our entire group of "friends". Circles give us the ability to target our message appropriately and thus increases the chance we will do so. She made some other excellent points that I won't share here so check out the link.
Facebook supporters need to find a better approach to criticizing G+ than Circles. The Circles concept is easy enough to defend and so far all of the criticisms I've heard have been weak while the arguments in favor have gotten increasingly strong.
These kinds of online dialogs are one of the reasons the
Internet is very cool. Similar types of conversations have been happening for centuries but two hundred years ago they would have happened by way of journals and private letters and taken months or even years to run their course.
This sort of rapid sharing and dialog is one example of why the pace of change continues to accelerate.
Image via
Wikipedia
Mike, I ended up on your blog because I'm partial to anything that mentions my name (lol) but ended up killing about a half hour reading through all your past blogs about G+, Empire Avenue, and of course In N Out. You're a pretty insightful guy. I'll definitely be coming back for more.
ReplyDeleteThanks Teresa. I'm certainly verbose. I subscribe to the school of thought that says if you say enough stuff eventually you'll get lucky and hit on something insightful.
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