There’s a simple reason that Google+ can not be a facebook killer – it adds to social noise and creates a walled garden where data can not be exported from nor imported to. There are no RSS feeds generated by Google+ that you can pipe into Twitter using Twitterfeed, nor can you import tweets to Google+ the way you can with Facebook. There is no Google+ API like the Facebook API that allows data import to the service from other services.
This is a huge, critical flaw in Google+ that guarantees it won’t be a Facebook killer.
A better use of Google+ would be to unify Gmail and Circles such that you can create whitelists for email with a single click. There’s no email service at present that permits a user to create a whitelist easily – you have to tediously set up manual filters instead, and even then there’s simply no way to say “send all emails (except some) to Trash”. A simple whitelist functionality is the real way to declare email independence. I fully support what MG Siegler is trying to achieve here but until we can say “receive mail ONLY from X, Y, Z” we will never be free of the tyranny of the inbox.
Maybe Google+ is the first step. But we need to stop treating it like Facebook and start thinking about how it can be used to improve the original social network – email. If Circles can be used to define whitelists, that’s real value.
Related: a little slideshare I put together a few years back about managing social noise. Still relevant, if a little outdated.
Well, this is the internet – Google+ isn’t set in stone. Given that they’re still limiting the number of members in their social network, my guess is that they’re still benchmarking performance and resource needs for running this. I bet that once this is open to the public, Google will start to roll out additional services like RSS and APIs, etc…