As I have found myself moving away from Facebook and towards Twitter over the last year, and now to Google+, I have friends and family asking why I'm moving to Google+ or even why Twitter in the first place. Of course, the reasons that I use these 3 systems will be different from why others use them, but I'd like to try and explain in terms that are easy to understand for everyone, why I have moved across these different social systems.
Facebook was, obviously, the big player on the market, and certainly isn't going anywhere anytime soon. With rumours of a Facebook IPO coming next week, we'll see just how much public and investor confidence there is behind this king of social media. Of everyone I know, it's odd that someone ISN'T on Facebook, whereas years ago, the question was "Are you on Facebook?" Today it's simply a given fact. So, why am I moving away from it? It's privacy controls for the longest time were dubious at best, and the spam from the Farmville zombies (amongst others) have really caused me to start ignoring Facebook. Do I use it to contact folks that aren't on the other networks that I use? Of course, and I do have a select group of people who's posts I continue to 'like' and comment on. I don't think I need to explain the Farmville spam, if you're on Facebook, you're either addicted to Farmville, or annoyed at those who are. This is called a Universal Constant. However, the privacy concerns are that for the longest time, it wasn't convenient to control who can see what posts. There are things that I want to share with co-workers, but not with family, and things that I want to share with my D&D group that I don't want to share with anyone else. They have gotten better with that type of privacy control in the last 6-9 months, but the other issue that I personally had with Facebook with regards to privacy, is that it seemed I had to reset my privacy settings and 'filters' several times in the run of a year. Am I deleting my Facebook account? Certainly not. It's there, I just don't post anything new, or produce anything for others to read there. What type of information do I get there? I get the occasional family update, some funny pics and links from old friends, and that's about it.
Twitter was something that I was vocally skeptical about when it first came out, but registered relatively early, even if to just camp my account name, before someone else took it. So what is Twitter, and why would I use it instead of Facebook? Twitter is faster, and leaner, and generally more relevant, if you follow the right people. Twitter is in essence a messaging system restricted to 140 characters, that when you post your message, called a tweet, everyone who follows you can see it. It broadcasts that message with no external filtering at all. You can also send messages (called DMs, or Direct Messages) directly to people, by using their username. For example, my Twitter account is @sirtoast. So, on Twitter, if you include @sirtoast in the message, it'll flag for me to see it. Twitter also uses a system called "Hashtags". A Hashtag is a keyword to index your post. If I wanted to make a post about the weather in Halifax, I might use #weather #Halifax as my hashtags, so that anyone can search for those keywords, and potentially see my post. "The #weather in #Halifax is pretty crappy today". Now, enough of the Twitter101. Why do I use twitter? It's fast and easy to follow a lot of groups and people and quickly scan what's going on. Remember, we're only talking about 140 characters per message. People tend to be concise, and more importantly, a surprising number of local services and businesses use it to communicate to the public. Metro Transit uses it to notify of weather disruptions, and my favorite radio station (a shoutout to the crew at Live105 @live105loud) shares those weather updates, as well as other traffic info. The usefulness of Twitter as a way to stay in touch with new events rather than simply "LOL, stubbed my toe this morning #ouch" was proven last year. One day at work, I heard about an altercation on Barrington street that I wanted to get more info on. I went to CBC.ca, went to the Chronicle Herald website, and saw nothing. So, I decided to test something, went to twitter, searched for "Barrington street" and "attack", and got a dozen tweets about what happened, including a link to a webpage with more info. Ironically, I think it was the Chronicle Herald website, but at that point, I saw the usefulness of this service, that at one point I thought of as being vapid and useless. However, the power of Twitter's 140 character limit, in my opinion, also means that for me, it will always be a tag-on service. It's not going to be the source of information most of the time, just a quick way to share information that is being generated elsewhere.
Which brings me to the new kid on the block, Google+. G+ is very interesting to me, in that it can be a bit of Twitter, and a bit of Facebook. First, a disclaimer. I am a big fan of Google's services, and I live in the Google ecosystem. I'm typing this blog on my Motorola Xoom tablet running Google's Android operating system, on Blogger, which is a Google service as well. I'll be linking this blog entry on G+ as soon as I'm done, and then post my G+ entry on Facebook and Twitter. I want G+ to succeed. Why do I like it? It's not simple Google fanboy-ism. Those privacy concerns that I had with Facebook, in controlling who gets to see what? That's baked into the first version of G+ released. The ability to post publicly, for everyone to see is there too, so it's like Twitter too. However, G+ has built in location tagging (optional, can be disabled) so that I can see local public posts. It's like twitter, but localized, and I don't need to follow people to see those public posts. In Facebook, you 'friend' people. In Twitter, you 'follow' them. In Google+, you add people to your circles. You can name, add and remove your circles, and with every post decide easily whether it's for the public, for all of your circles, or for individual people, or any mix in between. For the Facebook gaming crowd, there are also Google+ games, but it's no obnoxious to those of us that don't play, don't want to play, and don't want to help you get corn for your farm. Using G+, you can emulate Twitter, including hashtags with public posting, Facebook wall posts by posting to all of your circles, or even email by posting something to just one or two people. It's that flexibility and the integration into all of the Google services (Gmail, Contacts, Youtube, Google Music, etc...) that really interests me. Some people are freaked out by the integration, I'd much rather have it unified, than have the disjointed levels of service that we've seen from Google in the past. (for those Google Apps for Domains users, you KNOW what I'm talking about)
I also use Google+ as a bit of a news/blog aggregator. By having popular and interesting bloggers/personalities in my "Following" circle, I can see what they're up to, what their views and opinions are, and seeing what's going on in the world. One of the things that I haven't done yet with Google+ is use it's Hangout system. You can have Voice/Video hangouts of 10 people. So it's like a Skype video conference call. And it's just built into the system on the webpage. No software to download, no need to login (assuming you're logged into Google). President Obama has used the Hangout system to connect with people on Google+, as have many celebrities, Google execs, and just groups of friends.
Google has been posting numbers in the range of 90 Million users already (the service only was launched last spring/summer) which is an amazing number. It took much longer for Facebook and Twitter to reach those numbers. Google hit 50 million in just 88 days, where it took Facebook over 1000 just to hit 25 million. Mind you, Facebook was essentially creating social networking with every user, and Google is very well established and has a healthy level of cross pollination from it's other services like GMail.
So, if you're not on Google+, I invite you to take a look around, give it a shot. I think you'll find the noise level is better than Facebook, but you'll also only get out of it as much as you put in. I did a couple reviews on G+ that I have cross posted to this blog, and without any kind of publicity, I picked up followers from other countries based on the content of my reviews. Twice as many people have me in their Google+ circles since the summer than have followed me on Twitter, and I have more posts for longer on Twitter. Smarter people than me will tell you how much engagement their is on Google+. You simply get more and better engagement when you post/share things on Google+ than you do on Twitter and Facebook. I strike that up to the well established quality of Google's search algorithms. I think it's simply easier to find what you're looking for here.
The choice, of course, is yours, but if you're looking for me, I'll be on Google+.
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