Google Plus and Topic versus Privacy
So I'm exploring Google+. It's not revolutionary enough to vastly prefer it to any other short-form social media, but I know some people that think it's pretty awesome. If anyone wants to circle up, lemme know.
The part I like about Google+ is that it's only attracting people who recognize the value of quality internet communication (and this is true for the introduction of any cutting edge social media, really). The "normal people" who don't know better* are bound to find out if people begin to forsake Facebook for Google+, of course. And both sites have mechanisms to hide the posts you find tedious. But I think Google+ is doing a good job of teaching its audience that who you add and what you say to them on the internet is important to qualify. So maybe people will start making fewer tedious post in the first place if they convert? We can hope.
reddog_san mentioned another aspect of following someone that had one interest you liked (maybe roller derby) but another you had no interest in (cars). It would be awfully nice if it could figure out how to hide the car posts from you, but not the roller derby posts. He mentioned tags, which are nice when people are cognizant enough to use them. But what if it was something Google cultivated over time for you? If it came to recognize you used the words "babies" or "diaper" a lot, could it eventually suggest a "baby" category automatically when your friend started to write about her one-year old again? Then perhaps when you get sick of someone talking about a subject and you want to hide their posts, it can pull up the topic tags and say, "What about the content of this message do you not want to see, exactly? We'll try to hide it from you next time."
It's not foolproof, but combined with a manual tagging system, it might be a step in the right direction. Cause in a real-life face-to-face situation, my friend is pleasant and would know not to talk to me about cloth diapers, but I sift through topics that don't interest me all the time on Facebook.
What it boils down to, I think, is I don't care who I'm talking to as much as what we're talking about. On online forums, the topic of conversation is emphasized over the audience, and segmenting conversations makes much more sense to me. Even LiveJournal and dA have that to an extent with communities by topic. Which is probably why I still cling to them. Sharing my content with strangers (especially in short snippets) doesn't really bother me. I'm pretty mild-mannered, and my self-incriminating thoughts don't get put in writing at all. What bothers me is sifting through irrelevant stuff, and there seems to be more and more of it every day.
*By this, I mean pretty much every stereotype in this video:
The part I like about Google+ is that it's only attracting people who recognize the value of quality internet communication (and this is true for the introduction of any cutting edge social media, really). The "normal people" who don't know better* are bound to find out if people begin to forsake Facebook for Google+, of course. And both sites have mechanisms to hide the posts you find tedious. But I think Google+ is doing a good job of teaching its audience that who you add and what you say to them on the internet is important to qualify. So maybe people will start making fewer tedious post in the first place if they convert? We can hope.
reddog_san mentioned another aspect of following someone that had one interest you liked (maybe roller derby) but another you had no interest in (cars). It would be awfully nice if it could figure out how to hide the car posts from you, but not the roller derby posts. He mentioned tags, which are nice when people are cognizant enough to use them. But what if it was something Google cultivated over time for you? If it came to recognize you used the words "babies" or "diaper" a lot, could it eventually suggest a "baby" category automatically when your friend started to write about her one-year old again? Then perhaps when you get sick of someone talking about a subject and you want to hide their posts, it can pull up the topic tags and say, "What about the content of this message do you not want to see, exactly? We'll try to hide it from you next time."
It's not foolproof, but combined with a manual tagging system, it might be a step in the right direction. Cause in a real-life face-to-face situation, my friend is pleasant and would know not to talk to me about cloth diapers, but I sift through topics that don't interest me all the time on Facebook.
What it boils down to, I think, is I don't care who I'm talking to as much as what we're talking about. On online forums, the topic of conversation is emphasized over the audience, and segmenting conversations makes much more sense to me. Even LiveJournal and dA have that to an extent with communities by topic. Which is probably why I still cling to them. Sharing my content with strangers (especially in short snippets) doesn't really bother me. I'm pretty mild-mannered, and my self-incriminating thoughts don't get put in writing at all. What bothers me is sifting through irrelevant stuff, and there seems to be more and more of it every day.
*By this, I mean pretty much every stereotype in this video:
Click to view