maggie+media

Albert offers some great thoughts about why Google+’s Circles are so interesting. In particular, if Google+ takes off, I think Circles will likely make people feel even safer sharing information online than they already do in Facebook’s walled garden—and as we know from countless trend pieces, people (in particular young folks) are prone to oversharing, thinking they are 100% protected by privacy settings. If it’s on the internet, and it’s not a 1-to-1 message, your expectation of privacy should probably be slim to none—even if you just share it within your inner circle. 

continuations:

I am excited on many levels to see Google release Google+.  First, it was about time that  Facebook faced some head on competition.  If nothing else it will make Facebook better.  Competition is a healthy thing.  Second, I like the idea of trying a different cut on how to organize people and relationships.  We have had friends and followers, groups and lists, and now we have circles (incidentally, Etsy has had circles for a while).

There are two important issues that I am really curious about when it comes to circles.

Circles is apparently a super easy drag and drop interface (despite an invite, I am not in yet so relying on the descriptions of others).  Nonetheless, Google+ still separates the creation of relationships (circles) from specific services.  It will be interesting to see if that’s how people want to organize relationships as opposed to picking relationships within specific services (eg people I want to share my location with on foursquare, people who I want to shop with on Etsy, etc).

Second, I am curious about what kind of privacy expectations emerge around circles.  Google is promoting these with the following language (from the Google+ site):

The easiest way to share some things with college buddies, others with your parents, and almost nothing with your boss.

In other words, Google suggests that circles will allow people to share with a higher degree of control over “reach.”  Since circles don’t have a “friends of friends” problem that seems reasonable at some level, but might also wind up being misleading on another.  We have a fairly clear convention around one-to-one messaging (e.g., email, Twitter DM, SMS): assumed private (although a service like Bnter runs against that).  The public broadcast model of Twitter and Tumblr is also easy to understand.  But what should my privacy expectation be if I share something with a circle of “college buddies”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting hat Circles can’t or won’t work.  Simply that those are the two issues with regard to circles that I am most curious about because they have tremendous implications for all services with a social component (meaning: all services).  Now I can’t wait to actually get into Google+ so that I can experience circles for myself.

Love this: Tumblr is “a social network for content.”

steverubel:

Brent Simmons sees a natural evolution for blogs…

“New blogging systems like Posterous and Tumblr seem to be pretty popular, and they fill a nice middle ground: short content, easy sharing, social stuff. They’re cool.

But try to imagine replacing Daring Fireball, Scripting News, Apple Outsider, Shawn Blanc, or any of a number of great blogs with something like Twitter. You can’t. You’d have to invent blogs so that these writers have somewhere to write.”

Brent is right. Blogging, once again, is evolving. But he’s a bit off in portraying Tumblr this way.

Tumblr, to me at least, isn’t a blog platform but something new entirely - a social network for both original and curated content that is longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature. It’s a hybrid.

This nuance is lost in the news that Tumblr now has more blogs than Wordpress.com.

Consider this: over breakfast last week Mark Coatney from Tumblr shared with me that most of the platform’s billions of page views take place inside the dashboard rather than on the individual domains. That means that Tumblr is less like Wordpress and more like Twitter or Facebook - a social network for content rather than a blogging platform.

A huge part of Tumblr’s appeal is its community. Like Twitter and Facebook you don’t have to attract an audience, you just need to get them to subscribe. And while RSS is baked in, subscriptions are disguised simply as follows on Tumblr, making it all the more simple.

The more people start using Tumblr Dashboard as an aggregator, the more they create, share, comment and reblog. The network effect takes over and the platform grows.

When you add in the fact that the media is increasingly using Tumblr, you have an engine in place that can drive additional growth.

All the forces are in place, to me at least, to propel Tumblr as the next big hub. However, it’s not blogging that will do it but - like Twitter and Facebook before it - the community that’s driving the network effect and its meteoric growth.