Google Reader+ And Identity vs. Personas

On October 21, 2011, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

Google has announced that Google Reader will finally get a much-needed revamp. It will now be integrated with Google Plus, and its native isolated social network will be abandoned. See Techmeme for responses from the tech blogger community. The response from Google enthusiasts has been largely positive, as you can see in this Google Plus thread. For non-Google enthusiast responses, see this Hacker News thread.

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I have mixed responses to this announcement.

Positives

  • Google Reader will finally get a much-needed UI revamp. I suspect removing the native social follower-model within Google Reader will make it much faster.
  • Sharing from Google Reader to Google Plus will be much easier. I can quickly share an item from my Google Reader to my “Tech Enthusiasts” circle on Google Plus.
  • No way to get an RSS feed of your Google Reader shares. Many people use this RSS feed for auto-posting shares on their WordPress/Blogger/Tumblr blogs, in addition to Twitter. Of these, Twitter is where the most noise is generated by this auto-posting. I have written about this in great detail before.

Negatives

  • No way to follow a highly-curated tech-focused feed of other Google Reader enthusiasts. As a passionate Reader enthusiast who stays on top of tech news all day, my feelings about missing this feed is well expressed by Sarah on TechCrunch.

Understanding the Root Problem

My Google Reader shared feed is a tech-focused feed and nothing else. My Google Plus feed, however, is a mix of personal photos, personal blog posts, shares as a father about my daughter, etc. Where will my Google Reader followers get my tech-focused feed now? No, Google Circles doesn’t solve the problem.

The reason I have this tech-focused blog, and keep a separate personal blog (where I’m currently writing about Western Classical Music appreciation) is that readers of this blog expect to read tech-focused posts, while friends who know me personally enjoy reading my personal blog too. I do not pollute my own Google Reader shared items with my own personal blog posts.

The reason I have two separate Twitter accounts is for the same reason. @ScepticGeek is well-known as a tech expert, while people who either know me in real life or are interested in my other non-tech interests follow @Palsule. Different people even call me in real-life either as “Mahendra” or “ScepticGeek”.

Identity and Personas

Both Google and Facebook are now forcing me to be myself with all my varied interests in all my sharing and engagement on those networks. Twitter allows me to be two different persona. This is a crucial difference, recently described best by Chris Poole, nicely summarized by Tim Carmody here. The money quote:

Both Google+ (with Circles) and Facebook (with Smart Lists) misunderstand the core problem of online identity: It’s not only about who you’re sharing with, but how you represent yourself. “It’s not who you share with, but who you share as.”

On Google Reader I am @ScepticGeek, on Facebook I am @Palsule, on Twitter I can be both, and now I wonder what I am supposed to be on Google Plus.

The Future: Focus on Interest Graph

Does this mean Google Plus necessarily becomes a place of incongruous, irrelevant shares? No. What we need is better filters for relevance. I have written before about how Quora complements the Social Graph with an Interest Graph for greater relevance as well as serendipity. As a general-purpose social network, Google Plus needs to do more.

We need to be quickly able to filter the Google Plus feed by source – Google Reader, Photos, YouTube, etc. Google needs to invent a way to auto-tag/auto-classify Google Plus posts such that I can view a feed of tech news, personal photos, humor, photography, etc. using a simple UI filter.

This problem is understood by Bill Gross, who started Chime.in as a way to “Follow a Part of a Person”, the idea being that you can follow both @ScepticGeek and @Palsule on the same network, and depending on your interests, you will auto-magically see only the shares you are interested in. But with the likes of Google and Facebook in the race for dominance of the social web, it is unclear whether new startups focusing exclusively on this problem stand a chance.

Do you know who is already capitalizing on this problem and is hugely successful? Tumblr. Most people use Tumblr by sticking to a specific area of interest, and the social network makes it easy to follow others sharing your interests. With 850 million Facebook users, 50 million Google Plus users, why are there almost 30 million Tumble blogs out there with over 10 billion posts? I suspect it is because neither Facebook, nor Google Plus are an interest-based social network like Tumblr. The future war of the social web hinges on who better creates the most relevant experience for users.

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Google Plus: Why Facebook and Quora Should Worry

On July 1, 2011, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

Google launched Google+ this week, and there have been many excellent posts highlighting its potential as well as its challenges. My first impressions are very positive. I will not regurgitate any of the points already made by others, and will limit this post to what I think has been missed.

Relevance: “The Mother Of All Streams”

Most of the commentary about Google Plus so far has focused on its social feature – “Circles”, a new way of grouping contacts for targeted sharing. But as I’ve said before, the future belongs to the Interest Graph complementing the Social Graph.Google-plus-logo-640

Facebook has done a not-so-great job capturing users’ interests. Many people have ‘Liked’ hundreds of pages just because they were asked to do so by their friends. Facebook’s obsession with and overreliance on the social graph has corrupted their interest graph, and this might well be Facebook’s Achilles Heel in the long term.

Google Plus takes a different approach. The goal of Sparks is to capture your true interests. It is in a primitive state at present, but I’m talking about the Big Picture here! As Andrew Tomkins explains:

“Sparks is essentially the stuff that flows to you through the interest graph and the stream is the stuff that flows to you through the social graph”

This is precisely what I described was the secret sauce behind Quora:

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain.

Steven Levy goes on to explain how the Google Plus team plans to mix these two to create the “mother of all streams”.

Also: Once Google gets to know you better, it can help provide more relevant search results. Classic search disambiguation problem – when user searches for ‘apple’ is it for the fruit or the company? Your interests from Sparks can help Google learn what you’re looking for.

Why Quora Should Be Worried

It was reported earlier today that code for Questions has been found in Google Plus. If this comes as a surprise, you haven’t understood Google’s ambitions with Emerald Sea.

Unlike Quora, where users/moderators need to manually tag Questions to fit their taxonomy, Google could easily auto-tag questions. Further, it could easily AutoComplete your Question in a way Quora could only hope. And even further, in many situations, Google could answer your question without waiting for a human being to respond.

Imagine such a Q&A service working across mobile devices, where Google knows your location and much more about your interests and friends.

Why Facebook Should Be Worried

AllFacebook has a great post on how Google Plus is a challenge for Facebook. Some folks have already opined that Facebook has nothing to fear, that the mainstream users are not going to join Google Plus and quit Facebook in droves. But pundits have been wrong before.

I wouldn’t dismiss Google Plus so quickly if I were Facebook. Challenges for Google Plus:

  • Critical Mass: Google Plus needs a critical mass of users if its ever to gain mainstream acceptance. However, these are very early days, and early adopter response has been largely positive.
  • Games: Mainstream users love games. Google is reported to have invested in Zynga, while Facebook has had a rocky relationship with them. What if the next Farmville were to launch exclusively on Google Plus and not on Facebook?
  • Simplicity: As it stands today, Google Plus is not actually more complicated than Facebook, it just feels like it because it is new. Try introducing Facebook to a first time user and walk through the different features, and you’ll agree that Facebook has slowly evolved to a much more complex service with a plethora of components. Google Plus will need to become simple and intuitive to attract a sizeable mass of followers before adding new features.

There are a lot of unknowns, and my take is that it’s too early to make predictions. In any case, the stickiness factor of Google Plus is a big challenge for Facebook.

I am very impressed with what I’ve seen so far. There are challenges, but for once, I think the Emerald Sea team is seeing things in the right perspective and making all the right moves. In Feb 2010, I explained Why Google Buzz Doesn’t KISS. So far, Google Plus does.

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