Getting into Google+

July 17, 2011

I recently acquired a Google+ account. I think its a nice meld of features from Facebook and Twitter. The idea of being able to follow people and place them into circles where I can hold different discussions is great. This avoids the problem of posting geeky things that my WPI friends enjoy but my fellow law students do not care about or vice-versa. The downside is that we may be creating more of a filter bubble than we previously had. I think the one nice thing about facebook was the idea that it forced us to see each other as full people instead of merely a co-worker or merely a classmate. We may be mitigating the problem of employers possibly seeing the pictures of us drinking but we are not solving the problem of employers expecting their employees to not have fun or be social people outside their jobs. The greater transparency championed by Zuckerburg may be doomed.

I still have yet to explore all the features of Google+. It does not have all my friends from facebook or twitter in it. I wish there was a way to import them. When I discussed this with my friends they suggested that it was unnecessary because everyone was already on facebook. That just demonstrates the power of incumbency and defaults. I do not see Google+ as having additional cost other than the time to reform my contact lists. It’d be nice to have a feature to import my history from facebook, twitter, etc. for archive purposes but unfortunately those companies do not have that option.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.