More than 20 million people have signed up for G+ (my shorthand for Google+) already. That's a small fraction of the Facebook and Twitter user bases, but for a month of existence, it's a remarkable number (even though one news report suggests that people are using it less, on a per capita basis, than when they first joined).
I'm using it more. Although the service is still in "beta" status, by Google's account, it's already compelling – just as Facebook and Twitter have become compelling places to visit for college students (and many others) in recent years. Why? A former president of MySpace (remember MySpace?) wrote this week, "G+ is about people and community. It's a celebration of our very existence …"
I wouldn't go quite that far, but I will say that there's a great deal to like about the service. As I noted in a post a day after G+ launched, the Google team understood a number of things that have eluded the competition – the need for more robust control and privacy for users, which have eluded the Facebook folks, and a more user-friendly way to post short thoughts and have conversations around them, which has eluded Twitter.
Some observers believe Twitter is more in jeopardy than Facebook is, and that may be true. I'm certainly spending less time with Twitter, but I wouldn't dream of quitting entirely. The 140-character service is still leagues better for hearing and sorting through "breaking news", which I put in quotes because so much of what's new on Twitter is unverified. Moreover, third-party tools make Twitter quite useful for, among many other things, keeping track of certain people's links to what they consider important.
But Twitter has to recognise its vulnerability, and not just because G+ is more flexible in the way it can be used. It took less than four weeks to have more followers on G+ than I've accumulated on Twitter in more than four years. Now, this is not entirely shocking: Twitter started from a user base of zero, while Google+ started from a base of hundreds of millions of Google search users. But the number of followers is only a number. What's most remarkable is the level of engagement I'm experiencing with the people who read what I write. It is not uncommon to see dozens of comments on brief postings I publish at G+, an order of magnitude greater than responses generated at Twitter, where the conversation is much more difficult to follow in any case.
Google+ needs to copy Twitter in one essential way: by opening up its own data and conversations to third-party developers, because web browsers are still not robust enough for the kinds of things many of us want to do with the service. For example, it's easy enough to put a few people into circles – the G+ method of creating groups you want to follow – but organising them once you have more than a few becomes extremely clumsy with the current system.
The Google+ managers are also struggling with issues of identity – not theirs, but the identities of the users. At first, Google allowed people to sign up with pseudonyms and to create accounts for organisations. This violated the terms of service, but not for several weeks did Google react, and when it did, it unilaterally turned off some accounts. The company needs to allow both pseudonymous and organisation accounts, but only the latter appear to be on the way, according to public statements.
I'm also disappointed by what I've learned about the service's security. Although communications are encrypted, Google's responses to my questions about government spying on users were not encouraging. The company does not deny that: a) it can record users' text and video conversations even when they are, in theory, shared by only two people; and b) it will give government agencies the ability to tap these conversations as well. Google has to abide by the law, and it has a track record of resisting overweening government efforts to spy on US citizens.
The company might have created an architecture designed to ensure genuine security, but chose otherwise. Given its increasingly entanglements with government, this is not much of a surprise, I suppose. Nonetheless, I'd hoped Google+ might become a superb tool for dissidents in dictatorships, and it's a shame that it chose otherwise.
And, as noted several weeks ago, I'm not entirely sanguine, in any case, about putting more of my communications into websites I don't control. Google+ has become a nearly essential part of my day. I'm getting great value out of it, but I will be careful not to let it become an addiction.
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/28/google-privacy-facebook