The two features are interlinked, in what appears to be an attempt to make Facebook “friend lists” be more like Google+ “circles”.

New Sharing Options

This change started to roll out a few weeks ago and now appears to be  site wide, applying to all accounts.  The status box used to update your status got a few new controls and widgets.

New facebook status box

First, on the left are two new options. The “who are you with” button lets you tag people in your status update. The second widget adds location to the status. Ok, fine.

But the biggest change is the drop down on the right, next to the “Post” button. This lets you set who the status update goes to (sort of). The normal option (the way Facebook has always worked) would be the “Friends” choice, meaning the status update is seen by your friends only. If you specify “Public” your status is visible to anyone, basically making Facebook more like Twitter, where if you want to, you can publish your status updates for anyone to see. Bringing us to another new feature (described further below) where people that are not your friends, can “subscribe” to your public updates, again, more or less the way Twitter works. I think by default, Facebook has made the new default “Public,” so if you don’t change that, your status updates will be visible to everyone.

In addition to the “Public” and “Friends” options, you can now specify that an update should only be sent to friends on a specific list, one of your old “friend lists” (if you ever used that feature) or one of the new “automatic” lists that Facebook calls “Smart Lists,” which are managed by Facebook automatically for you based on profile information – another case of Facebook telling us “trust us, we know what you want.” Time will tell whether people find these automatic lists useful and trustworthy.

Finally, there is another special list called “Restricted” which is for friends that aren’t really friends This is where you put friends when you don’t want them to see your status updates. Friends on this special “Restricted” list will only see your “Public” updates (but I assume they still have access to your photos etc.)

Managing Friend Lists

The other significant change is in managing friends and friend lists. There are new options when you visit someone’s profile:

The new “Friends” widget shown above makes it easier to manage the lists a given friend is on. Every time you visit their profile, you can check or change what lists they are on. For anyone that suffered through the old cumbersome way of managing lists this is much easier than before, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

There’s also the new “Subscribed” button, which allows you to subscribe to a person’s “Public” updates, so that any status updates they mark as “Public” will show up on your page, even if they are not your friend. This is clearly a case where Facebook wants to be like Twitter.

Why This A Potential FAIL

These new changes are mostly being heralded around the net and in the media as a brilliant move by Facebook. Technically, for being obviously bolted-on, I have to admit they are not that terrible, in terms of the implementation. But here’s where I wonder if Facebook might be shooting themselves in the foot here, and actually helping Google+ (especially) and Twitter (to a lesser degree) which is probably not their intent.

Twitter is essentially still a mainstream failure, with only 8% of online Americans using it. It’s clear that one big reason is Twitter’s complexity and the inability of Twitter to explain what it does and how to use it to mainstream users. It’s too early to tell whether Google+ will reach deep into the mainstream the way Facebook has. One of the points I raised about Google+ is the complexity and that it is too confusing to mainstream users:

Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?”  Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.

With Facebook now essentially copying the Google+ “circles” model, they have now introduced the same kind of complexity into Facebook that hinders their competitors, effectively removing a major differentiator of Facebook: being easy to understand for mainstream users.

Facebook has just done Google a huge favor.

In essence, by force feeding this change to  its 750 million users, Facebook will be doing something Google themselves may have spent years doing: teaching them how Google+ works. Facebook users have no choice but to accept these new features, and struggle to learn them, which will make all Facebook users more comfortable with the “circles” model, and that level of complexity, ultimately making it that much less painful to switch to Google+.

Before this, if a Facebook user went to Google+, they had to figure out how “circles” and selective sharing work using Google+ itself.  Google+ would be their first exposure to this mode of operating. They would have no mental model for it and no prior experience with the ideas of it. Now, a Facebook user will have a direct analog from their Facebook experience – as soon as they hit Google+ they will already have an idea how ”circles” and selective sharing work, removing a huge switching barrier.

Likewise, with the new “Public” and “Subscribe” features, Facebook is teaching those 750 million users how Twitter works too, something Twitter themselves has been largely unable to do. However, I think in this case, Twitter is the loser and Facebook the winner (more on that in a separate post).

But Google+, on the other hand, just got handed an enormously valuable gift by Facebook.

Okay then. Well, here’s some quick takes after trying it out a bit.

1. The Good

This section is the hardest to fill in for me. We already have Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (and others). It makes it hard to identify an obvious place for Google+. There’s the much acclaimed (and sometimes befuddling) “Circles” (to scope the distribution of updates). There’s also “Sparks” (search) “Huddles” (group chat), and “Hangouts”. Of these, “Hangouts” is perhaps the most unique. It is a way to announce your interest in video-chatting. That’s very much like something we did with Phweet back in 2008, so perhaps that’s why I like it.

One other good thing? It’s not Zuckerberg. Google’s famous “do no evil” comment has to be something they regret saying by now, but even so, I still feel that Google is a lesser evil, especially when it comes to handling my personal data. Facebook has a simply atrocious record in this regard. The less they have of my data, the better.

David Pogue gives a number of reasons to like Google+ in Google+ Improves on Facebook at the New York Times. I don’t disagree with his points, so I recommend you check out the article. He concludes with:

Until now, Facebook and Twitter have been the Dominant Duo of social networking. But Google’s less sprawling, more video-centric, better-controlled new service is already too good to ignore. Now it’s the Dominant Duo …+1.

2. The Bad

Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?”  Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.

All the cool features discussed above under “The Good” could be put under “The Bad” when it comes to complexity and learning curve. Features are a double-edged sword. Confusion about how it works keeps a lot of people off Twitter, or at leasts keeps them from using it to share and Google+ appears that it is going to suffer from being confusing too.

3. The Ugly

Google will tell you that the coolest part of Google+ is that it is (or will be) integrated with all other Google services and features. I argue that this is the biggest thing that hinders the chances for Google+ to succeed and not just become another Wave or Buzz that people try for a while and then dump.

This is the “Google Account” problem. It’s the assumption by Google that you have one Gmail account that you use for everything. After jumping through some non trivial hoops, Google now allows you to sign in to “multiple” accounts (up to three, if they’re the right kind of accounts) at once, but one of them is the “primary” account and trying to use one of the others is like dancing a tightrope carrying an anvil in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. You’re probably going to get bloody… or hurt someone. You log out of one, and everything you use on Google gets signed out too, even if it wasn’t using that account. This is why people end up running a different browser for every Google account and for every Google product. I could go on and on about this nightmare.

At the moment, you can’t use Google+ with anything but the “primary” Google logged in account.

This is all fine for people that have exactly one Gmail account and it’s all they use. However, with more and more companies converting to Google Apps and more and more people working from home etc. many people are using more than one Google Account at the same time and using different Google Accounts with different Google services. For example. I’m using Gmail with one (or more) accounts, using AdSense with a different account, using Google Docs with another account, Analytics with yet another account etc.

When it comes to Google+ this problem affects you even if you don’t use multiple Gmail accounts and multiple Google services. Requiring and binding by browser session to a “primary” Gmail account means Google+ is limited to people that use Google and Gmail in that way. This means Google has pre-selected which friends you can and cannot find on Google+. If I look at the groups of people I interact with, I have never segmented them into “those that use Gmail and those that don’t.” That segmentation is not meaningful to me. Google might care, but I sure don’t – it doesn’t help me organize my contacts.  As @sreejitkk2000 puts it:

One needs to get a Google Account to use Google+ and they have to like it, in that they have to log in with that account and use it for every Google service they will ever use. Quick: What percentage of your friends have a Google Account?  Which ones don’t? Is that a breakdown that is meaningful to you? Is that a group categorization you would normally use to divide up your friends? I don’t think so. And yet, that’s what Google has done for us.

For those of your friends without a Google account, do they know how to get one? Would they want one? Is Google+ so great that you would walk all your friends through setting up a Google Account and Google Profile?  And what about those friends that you’d like to have in a “circle”, but that simply can’t (or won’t) use Google the way Google wants?

I think this is a fundamental mis-judgement by Google. They see the tie-in to a Gmail account and other Google services as a good thing but I see it as a massive albatross.

Summary

Google+ is kind of a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. It takes some features from Facebook, like rich content, updates longer than 140 characters, and comment threads.  And it takes some from Twitter, most notably asymetrical connections as in “Circles”. Then it brings in a few unique features like “Hangouts”.

It’s too early to tell what will become of Google+. For me, it’s a wait and see. I’m using it, but it has not grabbed me yet, mostly because nobody is there yet. The above “Google Account” problem already means I’m using an identity on Google+ that is not the identity that I want to use with it (because the identity I want to use is not compatible with it). And I see the self-selection discussed above coming into play and selecting for me the domain of people that I can connect with on Google+ (and more importantly, who I cannot connect with). This severely limits how I can use Google+ – until everyone I want to connect with converts to using Gmail as their primary login with a Google+ compatible “Google Account” and “Google Profile” it can’t replace Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for me. Instead, it’s simply one MORE place I have to check. I think this was a key factor in limiting and killing Buzz and Wave and it could easily also be the thing that kills Google+.

Some of this may be obvious “well duh” sort of stuff for others out there who may be a lot smarter than me. Hopefully it won’t all be that way.

As many of you may already know, over the last several years, I’ve worked on and otherwise participated in a number of side-projects, including:

• Phweet – a phone call in a URL
• Taglets – the story of tagged things
• Twitmart – Twitter Marketplace for social classifieds
• SuperTweet.net API – An Answer for Twitter OAuth-pacalypse
• TweetPress (140plus.com) – a free Twitter blog at http://YOU.140plus.com

Each of these can be considered a failure, depending on the metric or dimension one examines. Except for SuperTweet.net and TweetPress, all of them have since been shut down. Each of them have been a disappointment, to some degree or another, for me, personally. However, they also each provided various positive rewards, in addition to the sometimes painful lessons learned.

Metric 1: Popularity

Certainly, with the exception of SuperTweet.net, they are all failures in terms of popularity – they never gained any significant traction.

With the exception of Taglets.org, each of these services require a Twitter account – the only way to use the service is using your Twitter account. This was an intentional decision, where these services were supposed to be integrated with and tightly coupled to Twitter and your Twitter social graph. I don’t recommend such a strategy for anything real you may be doing. It’s fine for side projects like these, but it’s a bad decision for something you might hope to make into a business and you only need one reason for that, according to Pew Internet:

8% of online Americans use Twitter

So by limiting your target market to only those using Twitter, you are automatically excluding 92% of potential users. And that’s the number as of December, 2010 (according to Pew) at a time when Twitter was claiming over 150 million users.  It was even worse, much worse, back when we released Phweet in 2008 when Twitter had only a few million users.

There are other reasons to avoid putting too much emphasis on Twitter as a social network (which even Twitter says it is not), some of which I cover below, but obviously the 8% problem is all you really need to know.

Opening up your site to Facebook users will expose you to about ten times more users. That makes good business sense – however, in my case, I don’t particularly want to help Facebook lock-in more users and more sites, so I have elected to not implement Facebook Connect – a bad business decision, but one I accept on principle (and admittedly more weakly, on long-term business strategy grounds). I don’t encourage anyone to follow my lead on that, unless you also are doing so for something other than sound business reasons.

It’s too early to call regarding TweetPress one way or the other, but given that it is Twitter account-based, it suffers from the above problem of excluding the lion’s share of potential users that don’t have Twitter accounts, right off the bat. The service has not received any TechCrunch, GigaOm, or other such “juice” as Phweet and Twitmart did, and is only being promoted through the limited reach of my own followers and a few friends and others that have started using the service. As a result, growth has been slow, if not almost non-existant. Either way,  it serves my needs and it continues to be a wonderful platform for experimenting with different technologies, mashups, APIs etc. I have no plans to shut TweetPress down, regardless of whether it ever achieves wide adoption, but it’s always more fun when such services are embraced by a larger community.

Twitmart was being used by a few users, but it never even started toward the goal of helping users build a trading community with their Twitter Friends and Followers. Nobody used it that way. Instead, it became little more than a vehicle for spammers, so we shut it down.

As noted above, SuperTweet.net isn’t a disappointment in terms of adoption. It has been steadily growing since Twitter shut off Basic Authentication on the API. Unfortunately, most the users are parasites, contributing nothing in return (with notable exceptions, @ae6rt @TheDarkNighty and a handful of donations) – certainly it has not produced the kind of community of support I had hoped it would (naive, wishful-thinking on my part). Update: I have to take this statement back – there has been a significant upswing in community support for SuperTweet.net – thanks folks.

About the 8%

This brings me to some of the lessons learned about the 8% of people using Twitter. Let’s look at the Twitterverse in more detail.

With each of these services, we have learned something about the evolving Twitter user-base. And as Twitter approaches double-digit penetration into the mainstream, it may also provide some lessons about the Internet population at large.  We have seen this pattern before. The early adopters skew the personality of a service in the beginning. We saw it with Usenet, way back in the late eighties, and the pattern has repeated across many services over the years, right on up to Quora today.

In the beginning the services are populated with users that are smart, helpful, active etc. – there is a real community and it’s a regular utopian bliss. But then the real world steps in. And guess what, not everybody is so smart or sweet and nice. Some come from harder backgrounds where making a living might mean $1 a day. There are sleazeballs of every flavor with all kinds of motivations. If there is a way to exploit the service for their own personal gain, they find it, especially if it costs them almost nothing to do it (whether it’s the cost of a Usenet post, email, or a Twitter status update).

And Twitter is no different. As it’s gone from under a million users to hundreds of millions of users, the flotsam and jetsam of the population came along. As with email, the spammers and the like may be only a small fraction of the total user-base in number, but they can have a tremendous impact on the overall system. And there is a gigantic gray area of behaviors in the name of “social media marketing” and “SEO” going on on Twitter that sometimes cross the line. I read a business plan recently that literally referred to Social Media as the “advertising mecca of the future.” I suspect such is a common view among budding entrepreneurs.

One doesn’t have to look very far to find a huge array of consulting firms, PR agencies and others that will make all kinds of claims about their “secrets” and expertise in Social Media Marketing, often charging exorbitant fees – I shouldn’t even have to say it, but very few of them provide any value and most the time, engaging such a service will end up doing more harm than good by damaging your firm’s reputation.

Anyway, while I doubt the percentage of Twitter users that fit the above abuser category is very large, their presence is felt loud and clear. And they are the first to try to “game” any new system or service connected with Twitter, as well as Twitter itself of course. These are the folks that jumped on Twitmart and, I have to say, soured me on the project, and on Twitter as an ecosystem to a degree.

The Twitter “social graph” is a joke

In the bright young days of Twitter, a lot of us thought it might be a new kind of social network. And it was, for a while (and still is for a small percentage of Twitter users). But once Twitter started to aggressively market the service, attract celebrities, and celebrity stalkers, any chance of a meaningful social graph were put to bed. As Pew and other research has shown, there is nothing mutual in those relationships and no community or friendship aspect to them. Even Twitter finally acknowledged last year that they are a media company, not a social network.

Further, the Twitter Home Timeline, the stream of who you follow, has also become part of the joke. Most people that have a ‘reputation’ of any kind also follow a lot of people out of a sense of duty – they feel obligated to follow people so not to send a message that “we aren’t really friends,” even though they don’t really care much about that person’s tweets.  Their “following” list is so polluted with such connections, they really never follow it at all.  I had a high-profile Twitter guru tell me recently, in essence, that I’m not a serious or typical Twitter power-user because I don’t follow 500+ people. I brutally manage who I follow because I still actually read my timeline, basically every tweet in it. If I followed 500+ people, I may as well not be following any of them, because I’d never see most the tweets in that timeline/feed. But that’s exactly what a lot of people do on Twitter, making their home timeline, and thus their social graph, meaningless.

The implication is that any Twitter-related service that somehow relates to the social graph is working from bogus data and won’t be of any use to the largest segments of Twitter users, those for which the social graph is almost entirely meaningless.

Twitter is less real-time than you think

For news and events, the Twitter consciousness, the live timeline (fire hose), can provide wonderful insights as events happen. This is the broadcast platform role that Twitter serves very well.

In terms of real-time person-to-person conversation, however, Twitter is hit and miss, mostly miss. With Phweet, we discovered that most people don’t tune in to Twitter all that often or consistently. Here are some other issues that impair Twitter’s ability to serve as a communications platform:

1. Many connections aren’t mutual, so direct messaging fails
2. Twitter settings are too complicated, such that most people never figure out how to set up real-time notifications
3. Messages get lost in overflowing timelines
4. The 140 character limit kills deep conversation, or causes them to move elsewhere

Many services have emerged to try to solve the conversation problem on Twitter and they have all gone nowhere. In my opinion, Twitter as a person-to-person or small-group conversation platform is a non-starter.

Summary

In the end, Twitter is basically like a zillion RSS feeds overloaded with a messaging system (actually two messaging systems, @ messages that are semi-public, and direct messages that are email) wrapped around a search engine, and hooked in to SMS (at least in the US). Probably the original description of Twitter as a “microblogging service” is still the most accurate.

In short, people use Twitter to share stuff. Unlike a Facebook or LinkedIn style social network, tweets are generally shared with the world at large, not just ones mutual friendships. When, or if, people see what you share depends on a number of factors, not just whether they “follow” you or not. They might see your tweet as a search result, due to a retweet, as part of a Twitter list’s contents, or because the tweet was directed to them via @ messaging. And the fact that they follow you is no guarantee they will ever see your tweet, far from it.

All these things are important to keep in mind when conceiving applications or services that in some way work with Twitter.

So can you build a business, or even a viable service, around Twitter, exclusively? I don’t think so. Oneforty has done it (to whatever degree they are successful) and of course some Twitter clients have done alright (many have not done that well, especially once Twitter themselves became a competitor). Even though Twitter claims 200 million users, bear in mind that only 8% of online users use the service, and of those, only a tiny fraction make up the kind of users that can help build value in a community.

I wasn’t able to post about the site whose name shall not be writen. Facebook claims to be blocking this to protect us from “abusive or spammy” content. Yeah, right.  They are clearly only protecting themselves from bad publicity.

If I post the text of the site here, this post will likely also be banned. But here is the name of it with a redirect link:

the site whose name shall not be written

You can read more about it here and here.

It’s a search index of content that I suspect a lot of users thought was private.  Check it out to see if you or your friends information is on there.

BTW, the quote at the top of that site has been verified.

I realize the movie is going to be biased as hell – I think I’m still going to enjoy it!

That’s fine. It’s not my cup of tea, but I know a lot of people enjoy such things. But, thankfully, Facebook lets me block these applications to prevent flooding my Facebook newsfeed stream with messages from these apps, like: “Bob threw a show at you. Throw one back!”

Yesterday, I got the following in my Twitter stream:

I just won a fight against @mrblog on Tweefight. I won! Do you want to fight? Try now http://tweefight.com/?opp=filos

It turns out Tweefight is a new service/game launched by buddy Luca Filigheddu. Clearly, a lot of people love this kind of thing. As noted above, I’m not one of those people.

When someone fights you on Tweefight, a “tweet” link is generated that posts a tweet of the type shown above. I have scripts in place that send all @mrblog references to my cell phone. The last thing I want to see in that stream is a “so and so threw a shoe at you” message. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have a mechanism to block such tweets.

So I asked Luca if he could add an “opt-out” option to the Tweefight site, so if someone engages me in a “battle” on there, instead of getting a “tweet” link, they will see a notice that I’m not interested in receiving such messages. He agreed to implement an opt-out, which I think sets an excellent precedent for all future such “entertainment” applications.  Since twitter doesn’t have the equivalent of “block this application”, such sites are going to have to police themselves.

Apparently the site is getting a lot of usage (so much so it was off-line much of the day yesterday) so it’s nice that Luca is so receptive to suggestions. It looks like Tweefight will do just fine without me – which is terrific – to each his own.

Well, that must depend on how much they’re paid, or who you know, or some other random factors, because the PicDoodle app exhibits all the worst behaviors of an evil, evil virus, and yet Facebook continues to serve it up to users and defend the application.

The lame Silicon Alley Insider (which I refuse to link to here – look it up if you really need to see their awful reporting) attributes the following quote to Facebook:

“The PicDoodle application was tagging the maximum allotment of a user’s friend in each saved photo… This ran counter to user expectations…”

That statement is just infuriating. It is far beyond misleading and suggests that there’s a lot more to this story. There’s got to be something going on behind the scenes at Facebook for them to spew such total BS.

If PicDoodle messed around with tagging people (that I didn’t tag) in a “saved photo” that would be bad enough.  But what it actually does isn’t even on the same planet.  When one “Allows” (installs) the app, before they take any action at all, PicDoodle does it’s dirty work, all in the background. PicDoodle creates a Photo album and sticks a fake blank “photo” in it. It then tags people (your friends) who are not in that “blank” photo as being in that photo.

This causes all your friends to receive notifications from the Photos app (not from PicDoodle) saying they were tagged in a photo by you.  When they click to see what photo you tagged them in, instead of viewing a photo, they see a link to the PicDoodle app that suggests they need to click it to continue.  Since there is nothing else to see besides that link (because the actual photo is “blank”), the user clicks the link, hoping to finally see the photo that you tagged them in.

They get the usual “Allow” prompt to install the PicDoodle app, and still wanting to finally see the photo in which they appear, they click it.  And viola, the process starts all over again for that user.  And of course they never get to the “Photo” containing them – because there isn’t one.

How Facebook can declare this is just a “glitch” is beyond me.  PicDoodle was very obviously designed to perform these evil tasks to spread itself, even conning Facebook’s own “Photos” app into doing its bidding.

The Insider story concludes with:

Meanwhile, rumors on Twitter that PicDoodle is a virus or phishing scheme appear to be inaccurate.

So who are these guys blowing to get this kind of white-wash?