In the Right Circle

I've been on Google Plus for a few weeks now. In the beginning, it felt like showing up early at a much-talked-up party. There was a small scatter of people, poking around, examining the place, making preliminary conversation with the few others they knew. Most of the talk was, unsurprisingly, about Google Plus.

Unlike the crash-bang disaster of Google Buzz, its awkward attempt at social networking that alienated most users by publicly exposing their contact list, and then proceeded from error to error, Google Plus has been a low-key, careful affair.

In the first two weeks, Google calibrated entry, depending on its capacity — letting early adopters and "power users" examine the platform and tell them what's missing, and what works.

Google Plus mimics the real world, where people interact in clusters, and relate outwards in concentric circles of trust, rather than Facebook's megaphone model. You drag and drop people into different circles, and can either mark individual posts to specific circles and combinations ('family' 'college buddies', 'artsy types'), or make them public to everyone. You can catch up on these circles separately, and toggle between your many worlds, or choose to read the great river of updates on your "public" stream. Google Plus shows you a civilised way of arranging your acquaintances, avoiding that playground-level, plaintive, Facebook question: "why am I in your limited profile?"

In concept, Facebook also lets you slice your social world with friend lists, but it's a tedious labour that few have undertaken. Design is everything — and Facebook was clearly not built for such fine-grained customisation, because everything about its default settings pointed the other way. In fact, its young CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to think an attachment to privacy was some faintly embarrassing, vestigial trait — the sooner we accept its obsolescence, the better.

... contd.

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