Google+, the search company's new social network Yesterday afternoon, the search company's new social network, and I've been scratching my head ever since. In press reports "see Steven Levy's Wired account of the making of Google+" people at Google shy away from the term "social network," and they bristle at the idea that Google+ is meant to be a "Facebook killer," or even that it's supposed to be a competitor to Facebook. For instance, you can have a circle of work friends, a circle of college buddies, a knitting circle, and a circle of jerks. Google would concede all of this; Google+ is currently in "field test" mode, which means that it's available to a very small number of people, and Google has offered no timeline on when it will open up for the public at large. Given the large overlap in functionality, I can't imagine that many people will use Google+ and Facebook simultaneously.



Google+'s success, then, will rest in large part on Google's ability to convince people to ditch Facebook for the new site. As best I can tell, the underlying philosophy of Google+ seems to be that, in the real world, people don't keep one all-encompassing "social network" of the kind that Facebook calls on us to build. The first thing you're called on to do when you first join Google+ is to create your own "circles" of friends. (You're given a few default groups to start with "friends," "Family," "Acquaintances" but you can rename these or create your own.) To put people in circles, you just drag and drop their names from the top half into any circle you like. Facebook's "Groups," which lets other people manage your circles through rote tagging, is somewhat easier to use, but still apparently too much work for most people.

If Google+ lets you manage these groups more easily, wouldn't it stand a good chance against Facebook? You've still got to manually corral your social network, and this can take a lot of time?especially because the initial suggestions in Google+ are populated by your Gmail contacts group, which means that there are hundreds of people to choose from (many of them duplicates). There's always the possibility that Google will make this process easier by adding some of its legendary algorithmic magic, using applied social-network theory to guess who belongs in your work circle, in your college circle, and in your personal ninth circle of hell. Perhaps if it does this well enough, people will see this as enough of a reason to share stuff on Google+ rather than Facebook. There are certainly people who want to control their networks at a much more granular level, and for those people, tools like "circles" or Facebook's lists come in handy.

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