Jul 7, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg on Google+ 'Circles'


"Google+ 'Circles' may not be sufficient to beat Facebook"


Speaking after Facebook launched new chat products on Wednesday, Zuckerberg pointed a finger at the 'Circles' in of Google+, which had been touted as the killer feature that made a differentiation with the Facebook model.


The definition of groups is  " everyone inside the group knows who else is in the group," Zuckerberg said. The Facebook founder has always said the idea of asking users to create and maintain group is an impractical one. Here, in the Google+ model, this is exactly what happens.

The core theme behind Circles is that people don't want to share all information to everyone they know and that they would rather want to share select pieces of information to various people in their friends list. For this they need to create groups and share information accordingly. This is pretty similar to the Twitter model of asymmetric sharing whereas Facebook follows the symmetric pattern under which everyone knows who all are in the group.

"Circles are one-way, or asymmetric. Everyone sets up their own Circles and nobody knows whose Circle they are in," writes tech analyst Erick Schonfeld in TechChrunch

Zuckerberg closed in on this apparent flaw in the Google+ model. If everyone doesn’t know who are in the 'group', and more importantly, if nobody knows which group they are in, how can this be called a group?

Google presented Google+ to help users come as close to the experience of real time sharing as possible. "Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss," according to Google.

via IBT

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