A Quote to Quote

Talking about social networks like Facebook, Tweeter and a new social effort from Google called Google + :

“The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food — wrapping everyone in ‘friend’ paper,” Google executive Vic Gundotra writes in a blog post. “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software.”

From How Google+ compares to Facebook, By Mark Milian, CNN, June 28, 2011 10:22 p.m. EDT

Think about it: deeper than the discussion on the possibilities of success of this new competitor for Facebook lies another one on the role of what is called social media, or social networks on the way we interact: It is great to be able to chat with others regardless of the distance, no doubt about it. Less clear to me is the convenience of the de-facto redefinition of privacy that they promoted, or, like this quote emphasizes, how relationships tend to become flat, lacking differences that are natural when they use other media. At the end, there are lots of great people around me, known and unknown, but there is people that is closer to my heart than others, and I prefer to deal with them in different terms, using tools reserved for them.

You will say that social networks allow users to organize their ‘friends’ in categories, giving them various levels of access. Yes, but seriously, do you classify your friends and family that way in the ‘non-virtual’ world? Personally, there are things that I keep to myself, things that I share with some people, and things that I don’t mind making public. My problem is that the circumstances of those potentially shareable ‘things’ are different and are dynamic, and I don’t have the time nor the patience to adjust the settings of my social network application to reflect those dynamics. It feels schematic, artificial… and it is!

I feel like I am not alone in this. Am I?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI

Google’s introduction to the Google + project, from Introducing the Google + project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web, at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html