By Michael A. Romig / Austin, TX / January 25, 2011
Early in the Google+ launch two things became evident. First Google was positioning itself to
become a centralized identity engine.
This capability has grown as we’ve seen the rollout of Google Authorship
Profiles and now serious integration with Blogger. Second we saw the public rollout of Google+,
a very promising content publishing and collaboration platform. Google+’s strength was the ability to
interact with other users around the world on common interests. One could organize user contacts into
distinct user groups and share content only to specific users or groups. Well at least one could do that in private.
One of the early Google+ publishing design flaws was the
inability to direct content to certain groups and still make that content publically
accessible and searchable. This meant if
I had people interested in my comments on technology and I was in their
technology circle if I ever posted travel tips, humorous articles or even
photos those users interested only in my tech views would see all kinds of
stuff from me they didn’t really care about.
I had no way to limit who I “published” my content to. Google+ crudely equivocated a “public” post
to mean share this content with everyone who follows my content.
This did effect the way I published content and from what I
observed others as well. It pressured
people to become somewhat one-dimensional in their public posts for fear of not
wanting to “spam” people with content probably only relevant to a small
audience. Overall, I believe, it limited
the amount of public sharing and public collaboration.
So one unfortunate answer to this design flaw is to create
multiple Google+ accounts. Early on I
posted that I thought Google had nailed this problem and multiple identifies
wouldn’t be required. By contrast I have
two twitter accounts: one personal for family and friends and another public. Although for “receiving” content and sharing
privately I think Google+ has nailed this.
When it comes to content you want public there isn’t a good answer. I’ve been patiently hoping and waiting for
Google to figure out a way to overcome these initial assumptions, but without
any visible progress have to recommend the same strategy now for Google+ I use
for Twitter.
Creating multiple user accounts does solve the problem of
giving one the granularity they need to direct messages to users in the exact
combinations one wants and still make that content “public”. It is just really kludgy. But also multiple accounts pretty much dilutes
or even destroys the overarching goal as Google becoming an identify
service. If I share only a part of
myself in one account and another part in another account, there isn’t a single
unified view of me. Additionally one good
requirement of an identify solution is the restriction or elimination of
duplicate accounts. Here I am suggesting
duplicate accounts could “solve” a problem with Google+.
Directed public publishing is a complex problem that hasn’t
been solved. I haven’t started using
multiple accounts myself on Google+, but I have been tempted more than once;
and now more than ever as I don’t see a good way to work around this.
