Google profiles need to solve facebook's privacy problem. Do what the competitor's aren't doing. Let us have control over what we share. They disrupted email with with gmail (by offering the storage space people wanted) they should do the same for social.
If you google google circles circles was supposed to do that, and more, by offering you not just a profile, but multiple circles, to help keep your boring dysfunctional professional life from your boring dysfunctional family. It was a 2-3 day story on March 11ish, then denied by google....
1. Allow the user to easily separate public from private personas. It could be public Linkedin-type profile to general views and allow informal personal profile like Twitter to exist for personal friendships.
2. It's not really about the settings, it's about feeling secure about your web identity.
By default everything is private -- even my existence in the social network.
And then modes to easily see what is available to different classes of people. E.g., "my friends view", "my public view", etc...
And then when apps say they need a specific class of data, I want a button that will show exactly what will get sent to them today. So when I click this I can see, "Oh, you're getting those pictures!" or "I didn't realize my phone was still in here and being sent over".
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory but leads to a pretty awful experience in practice.
Here's an example for you: You are a private user on the social network. You post on a friend's wall (or equivalent).
Can that friend's other friends see your post? If not, that's going to make it seem like there's no activity on your network.
Can that friend's other friends request to add you as a friend? If not, that's going to prevent people from making new friends. But if they can, then you've confirmed your existence on the network every time you've done anything.
It turns out that if you want to be a private person, you don't get a lot of value out of your social network, and the social network doesn't get a lot of value out of you. Your best option is to not join a network at all--and, indeed, if you target your network to users who mainly want privacy, you'll find that is what will happen.
Comments
Google profiles need to solve facebook's privacy problem. Do what the competitor's aren't doing. Let us have control over what we share. They disrupted email with with gmail (by offering the storage space people wanted) they should do the same for social.
If you google google circles circles was supposed to do that, and more, by offering you not just a profile, but multiple circles, to help keep your boring dysfunctional professional life from your boring dysfunctional family. It was a 2-3 day story on March 11ish, then denied by google....
What do you think Google should do that Facebook doesn't let you do with its privacy settings?
In my opinion, Google is even more open than Facebook about user data...
1. Allow the user to easily separate public from private personas. It could be public Linkedin-type profile to general views and allow informal personal profile like Twitter to exist for personal friendships.
2. It's not really about the settings, it's about feeling secure about your web identity.
By default everything is private -- even my existence in the social network.
And then modes to easily see what is available to different classes of people. E.g., "my friends view", "my public view", etc...
And then when apps say they need a specific class of data, I want a button that will show exactly what will get sent to them today. So when I click this I can see, "Oh, you're getting those pictures!" or "I didn't realize my phone was still in here and being sent over".
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory but leads to a pretty awful experience in practice.
Here's an example for you: You are a private user on the social network. You post on a friend's wall (or equivalent).
Can that friend's other friends see your post? If not, that's going to make it seem like there's no activity on your network. Can that friend's other friends request to add you as a friend? If not, that's going to prevent people from making new friends. But if they can, then you've confirmed your existence on the network every time you've done anything.
It turns out that if you want to be a private person, you don't get a lot of value out of your social network, and the social network doesn't get a lot of value out of you. Your best option is to not join a network at all--and, indeed, if you target your network to users who mainly want privacy, you'll find that is what will happen.
They need to advertise that