It's funny how working for a west coast tech company (especially such a small one ;)) makes you exceptionally more connected. I had no shortage of Google+ invites today and didn't even realize it until a current Googler friend asked if I wanted one.
So I poked around it and messed with it tonight. It's Facebookish without a lot of the bullshit you have to hide (I'm looking at you, everyappeverwrittenforFacebook). It makes out circles to be some kind of revolutionary thing, but aside from a better UI, it's mostly just friend lists.
Playing with this reminds me that Facebook's strength has nothing to do with its features. It's the critical mass of users. If the hundred or so people I care about were also using Google+, I probably wouldn't care which one I used, as long as everyone else was.
A part of me has always wanted to write a social network app. I kind of did, once, and it had a nice little community of a dozen or so people for a couple of years. They even paid for it. But everyone outgrew it, including me. It would be an interesting science project, but I don't want to build something no one uses.
The thing I've noticed since moving to Seattle is that something like Facebook is hugely important for keeping in touch with people, but it is not a replacement for real, human contact. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into FB, but for me, it often just makes me realize how infrequently I get to spend face to face time with people. That's a symptom of having such a distributed network of friends. If Facebook didn't exist, that situation would not be different. I'm surprised by the number of people who view Facebook as a substitute for the real thing.
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