Comment by bad_user
10 years ago
You're making some valid points, however I do not agree with some of them.
For me Facebook is only useful for my personal life. Should I want to post about some programming stuff? Doesn't belong on FB. The reason is because FB ends up being a disaster if you combine your friends and personal interests with your professional network. It just doesn't work as it doesn't give you the tools to separate the two. And yes, I ended up silencing or unfriending folks for that reason as well, as an alternative to deleting the account altogether. And I have no acquaintances that use FB for non-personal stuff, unless they sell social media bullshit of course.
You're talking about circles being complicated. Not sure what it has to do with OOP, though those circles do represent a taxonomy. And they are complicated, but at least Google attempted solving the problem. The problem being that at home I'm a totally different person. And when I follow people I don't know, I follow them only to get stories on certain topics of interest and I don't really care about their personal life.
You're saying that G+ was tech heavy. I disagree because that's currently Twitter and G+ would have won if that were true. I don't know the reason, but my guess is that it had to do with shitty things like the real name policy. Or in other words, having FB's creepy restrictions without the network effect.
> Should I want to post about some programming stuff? Doesn't belong on FB.
That was kind of my point #3. You already had Facebook for your friends so G+ became your network for your geek friends and geek co-workers. If you're not a geek, you were already using LinkedIn for that purpose. That's a small market.
OO Programmers (and biologists) are the only people who naturally think in terms of complex taxonomy.
Agreed, their real name policy made it completely unattractive for many purposes, including Mashable trying to set up an account and needing to rename it to Pete Cashmore (if I remember right). But Twitter is not tech heavy, it's tech/startup/entrepreneur/media heavy, including tech but not strictly limited to it.