Mike Elgan is an avid google Plus user, I have him in a circle and am interested to see what he posts and what he has to say. So the problem is not the man himself, the problem is that users like him expose the greatest floor in the Google Plus system.
People / personalities use Google Plus as an elaborate twitter. It’s a great way to build your own personal web authority, link backs and all that SEO kind of stuff. This is great. However, Twitter is Twitter. It is just a mass of people craving followers, sharing interesting posts and engaging with other, like minded people. It is an endless stream of shares, re-tweets and the occasional one-line snippet of opinion / abuse. Again, this is fine as that is, more or less, what Twitter is about. People use Twitter in a different way to how they use Facebook. People would tweet stuff that they would never want to put on their facebook wall (timeline). If you follow somebody on Twitter you expect that they would tweet on topics related to their area of expertise or interest.
So what does Mike Elgan have to do with this? Imagine for a moment that you actually did have friends and family using Google Plus (now, come on it’s not that funny!) and Mike, or Mikey as you know him, is a long time buddy so you drop him in your friends circle. What do you get? You get subjected to his professional persona, his tech insight with - hopefully - a sprinkling of posts that are more personal. Now if you were following him on twitter, or indeed following him on Google Plus, you’d expect this, but if you are friends with him and are wanting to replace your use of Facebook with Google Plus you really do not want this. You want pictures of "mad Mikey" on nights out, banter and general high jinx. Sharing pics, posts and links with friends should be very different from those posts that you want to publicly share and yet if you circle somebody you have to put up with both.
Vic Gundotra recently announced that 400 million users had "upgraded" to Google Plus and that 100 million were actively using the website and / or mobile app. These are impressive figures, the growth is rapid, but is it being used as a social network or as a networkers network?
In order to really take on Facebook - which has to be what they want to do - they have to find a solution to the conundrum of how to mix business and pleasure. Facebook users are not diehard supporters of the site, or of Zucherberg, in fact probably the opposite. However they will carry on using the service as there is no real alternative. In order for Google Plus to really matter, in the same way that Facebook does, it has to focus on the service it provides for friends and family and how to exclude the professional side of it.
I am a huge fan of Google Plus, I wish I had friends that actually used it. I had a recent conversation with a Canadian girl that I had just met, she want to see some photos I had taken from a gig. Obviously I grabbed her email address and on noticing it was a gmail account:
"Ah you use Gmail, are you on Google Plus?"
A moments thought as she wondered.
"Errr... yeah, I think so.
"Ah. so you are on it but never use it?"
"Yeah, does anybody actually use it?"
So to Vic, here are some ideas:
Create two mothership circles: Business and Personal in those two circles your usual circles can be placed. Then when making a public post the author can select to exclude either the Business or Personal mother circle from seeing the message. The post is still a public post, so a friend could still have the option of seeing it if they visit their friends page, or in the stream there could be one line: “Mike Elgan made a Business post”. This would make the professional persona less intrusive.
Instead of a + you use a - to exclude circles from seeing a public post in their main stream. As before it is still public, so a friend could still see it, but they will explicitly have to want to see it.
A user can select not to see public posts by default on selected circles (circle settings). (Although I personally think the onus should be on the person making the posts)
Get this sorted and it will be a step in the right direction for getting that mix of business and pleasure just right.