I’ve read a few posts recently proposing that Facebook has “won” at social. They’ve certainly done an amazing job with much of what we call social networking.
What’s missing, and why Twitter and Google+ will continue to do very well, is the discovery aspect. For 95% of us, Facebook is a place where we connect with people we already know, work with, or have some other loose connection to. We haven’t embraced it as a place to discover new interesting people. Partly because that wasn’t the intended purpose, and partly because that’s not how the UI works.
I’ve said many times that the value of Twitter (for me) has been the ability to connect with and learn from very interesting people that I wouldn’t have a true social connection to in the real world. It’s an opportunity to stand over the shoulder of the smartest minds in a given field and learn from them, read what they are reading, and often to make a meaningful connection that turns into something more.
A social network based on real life connections is needed, without question, but that’s only part of the true value of social networking. Twitter allows us to mix the two, though not interact differently with different audiences. Google+ is the first network IMO that captures both sides in a compelling way.
In the real world, we interact with different groups of people differently, the premise behind Google+ and it’s ‘circles’. In an ideal world, we connect with and learn from people as disconnected from us as Kevin Bacon, and progress gets a whole lot more interesting.
