Here’s the problem: I hate my friends. You do too. I’m using the word “friends” in the social networking sense. Facebook and Flickr “friends.” Twitter and Tumblr Followers.
These people don’t like you, and vice-versa. You probably haven’t even met in real life. They’re limitless binary relationships that we have to choose to share reciprocally with, or not.
I want to keep secrets from those people. At least some of them. Sharing information online with the whole world can be scary. You never know when it’s going to rear its head and bite you. This is where Google+ comes in.
Google+ is great for semi-sharing. You use it to have private discussions with adjustable groups of people. For business meetings and family gatherings and planning your weekend or vacation or career change with a small subset of your social circles.
Semi-sharing is pretty much the killer feature of Google+. It makes it really easy to host a small, quasi-private discussion. I can add individuals or groups depending on who I want involved. And it does this on a per-post, or per-discussion basis. That’s just like real life. Which means you can be real. You can be genuine.
The problem is, nobody’s doing that. Or at least, not enough of us are.
Google+ has this great ability. Yet so far, unless you are a very wonkish person, it is quite boring. Most of the public conversations seem to revolve around Google+ itself. It’s a lot of people gathered in a room together taking turns smelling their own farts. It’s a naval-gazer’s paradise, which is always boring.
Worse, until you get a critical mass of friends on there, the private conversations aren’t exactly thrilling either. I’ve already been circled by almost 2000 people. And I still have yet to see anything interesting.
Give me some blood! Give me some heat, some passion, some life! Let’s use this fucking thing for what it’s capable of, if we’re going to use it at all.
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