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Google+ Growing As a Social Backbone
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google+ has added 20 million users in just 3 weeks. According to the article, no other site has recorded such high growth in such a short time period. Twitter did something similar once, but in months, not weeks. It's especially surprising considering that access to Google+ is by invitation only. Why is Google+ growing so quickly?"
A recent article at O'Reilly Radar offers a possible answer to this, calling Google+ "the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone," but one that requires openness from Google to really flourish and supplant Facebook. The growth of Google+ will be helped by their acquisition of Fridge, a startup company focused on group sharing. Meanwhile, recruiters and marketers are already eyeballing the growing social network and licking their chops.
On facebook, you can't chose who among your 300 "friends" sees what you want to say. Facebook "filters" (well, censors) your post to a select people based on various past indicators. You have no control over this process whatsoever.
Technicality: I don't disagree with the spirit of your statement, but it is possible.
I have my friends in friend lists based on where I met them. Considering this isn't used by almost anything I've seen (although it does show up when using facebook messaging in a third-party client like Pidgin), I suspect most people don't even know it's there. The mechanism to set these groups is also not terribly obvious.
When I go to the 'post status' box on the main page, there's a lock icon telling me I'm defaulting to "friends of friends". Clicking it gives access to a dropdown list including "Customize". From there, "Make visible to" "Specific people..." gives me a text box to start typing in names, along with a similar box to refuse access to certain people or groups. If I type in the name of the friend group, it adds that group as a single entry.
That process is entirely retarded, the UI designers should be shot, and to my knowledge, you have to do that with every single post that you want given non-standard permissions (unless you save it as default), but technically, it exists. It may as well NOT exist for non-techies, and of course for anyone who doesn't know it's there, but it's possible. To my knowledge, it's been there for years.