More Social is not More Useful
I don’t know about you, but the creeping “let’s make everything social” trend disappoints me. I was reminded on how everyone wants to make everything social today by both Google and Facebook–first, with Google jamming Google+ into its Google Contacts and Gmail services, and Facebook adding a “Subscribe” button so that readers of websites can “follow” contributors to the site.
In part, I think these are just Google-wanting-to-be-Facebook, and Facebook-wanting-to-be-everywhere, and maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but really, does knowing what my venture capital friends are listening to on Spotify really going to help me land a round for my company? Do I really have to know what the hundreds of people I am connected to Facebook are reading at any particular moment? Do my readers really want to follow me on Facebook to know where I ate for lunch? Does everyone who gets our daily emails really want to see my mug every morning, in addition to their news?
In part, I think the problem is that I’ve got my worlds in life separated into compartments, and Google and Facebook think I don’t. I also like to use Google’s Gmail and Contacts as a utility, not as entertainment, and this “social” stuff is too much entertainment and not as much utility. Google is convinced I want to see a photo of all of the people emailing me and to interact with them on a real-time basis, and see their intimate thoughts and blog posts on everything. Facebook thinks every social detail of my contacts (hey, Joe just had lunch with Mary! Bill just flew to Dallas! Wanda and John are having a Christmas party! Sam just biked 10 miles! Jill just watched a funny video!) is worthy of my immediate attention. Maybe it’s the scale of things; I get hundreds of emails a day, have thousands of contacts, and there’s only so much attention someone can give to so many people.
Maybe it’s just Google and Facebook are trying to apply things you might care about on a close, social scale (ie best friends) to every darn person you’ve ever met. While it might be great for me to know your favorite vacation spots if you’re a good buddy, I can’t think of a reason why I need to know that about every entrepeneur I’ve ever met. While I might have a group I share music tastes with, I can almost guarantee you that my music tastes are neither relevant or useful to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, attorneys, or my dentist. Maybe it just feels like all this social stuff is trying to lump me into a bucket with all of my contacts, where we aren’t (yes, some entrepreneurs hang out together, but not all entrepreneurs like the same music, wear the same fashions, support the same political candidates, or like the same beer!). I know Google+ is designed to let you dice/slice/cut/chop your contacts into different segments, but it feels more like Google is trying to use everything else it has (search, email, etc.) and whacking it with a big Google+ hammer to try to wrench your social networking attention away from Facebook, no matter how useful it might be.
So how should this work instead? Let me decide how social I want an experience to be. If I want my Gmail to be just like Facebook, let me turn on all the social features. If I want it to be more like Outlook and not include any social features, so be it. If I really want to know the 150 tracks my business contacts are listening to at any moment in time, let me turn that on–or more likely, off. Let me have better controls to dampen out the kind of information I am getting from contacts (moving jobs, good; moving mouse, not good). Don’t mix business and pleasure. Favor useful information over raw data. Reduce, not increase, the amount of extraneous information flowing through the system. Automatically default to less social, not more social.
Where am I going with this? I don’t know, but I do know this: don’t make your app or website social just because you can, or because everyone else is doing it: make it social because it’s useful.
