Over the last few years I’ve become quite involved with social media. That’s great and all, but to be perfectly honest, there are some days I wish I’d never become active. It’s not that I don’t enjoy connecting with others, and it’s not that I don’t care about what people are doing; it’s all the goddamned spam!
I’m not kidding. My Twitter stream has become an illegible scrawl of “look at me”! And I long ago stopped using Facebook when a girl who I haven’t seen since the third grade (and who was mean to me then) wanted to be my friend. Not to mention all the Farmville spam, invitations to join groups I would never want some people to know I was a part of, a continuous barrage of “my vampire beat up your zombie” updates…honestly…I DON’T CARE!
But you can’t tell people that. Unfriending someone on Facebook is almost like telling them you hate them on some deep personal level. Filtering Facebook updates requires a degree in advanced calculus. Telling people, “please don’t spam me on Facebook” when they were in all likelihood offering you something you might enjoy, could hurt their feelings.
And Twitter? It’s fully binary: either you’re following somebody, or you’re not. Sure, you can unfollow one person, but to really carve out the spammers, you need a third party plugin. And even that’s not foolproof!
So it was I felt despair.
And then I got an invitation to join Google+.
At first I thought, another godforsaken social media app. I accepted the invitation and didn’t really look at it. But then I thought, what the hell, why not give it a whirl?
My conclusion? It’s. Fucking. Awesome.
The most important feature of Google+ is that you can throw all of your friends into circles. You can have a circle for your family, a circle for colleagues, and even a circle for lesbian Nazi vampire hookers if you want to. Why is that important? Because you can choose which circle you want to share something with. Had a fun time at a lesbian Nazi vampire bar and you wanted to show your friends pictures of a hot stripper biting you on the neck? Only those in the appropriate circle will see.
Busy on a project and you just want to look at updates from your colleagues circle (or a more specific Project Team circle)? Turn off updates from the other circles, and the noise is instantly turned off.
Want to be friendly and return a follow request from someone you totally don’t care about? Create a circle called “Boring Creepy People” and lump them in there. They won’t know how you’ve categorized them, and you can turn their updates on or off as you like.
I’m not kidding you. It’s heaven. Google+ has solved two important social media problems: the lack of privacy, and the lack of effective filtering.
From a project management perspective, it has some very intriguing uses. I’d like to get your comments in the section below with ideas on how these two features could facilitate project delivery!
And if you’re looking for an invite to Google+, by all means, hit me up!
