Will it go round in circles?

Back in the day I bought a live LP by a guy called Billy Preston that included the title of this posting. The song itself has a blues and gospel history and was a decent reworking by Billy and his group, the God Squad if memory serves me correctly. The LP is up in the attic with other obsolete artefacts and I hadn't given it a thought in years until today.

Google looks like it is giving up its intentions to challenge Facebook with its Google + endeavour, the social medium that promoted Google Circles. The reality is I don't think many of us understood what Google+ was trying to do - to be fair, I'm not sure Google knew either. I'm fairly certain they wanted to take a chunk out of Facebook's market, but tried to do it in such a way that it didn't make much sense. I'm in a few Google Circles because I've been invited in by people I've never heard of - in itself an established practise on Twitter - but haven't felt any compunction to follow it up or generate other contacts. In truth it just seems that little too complicated.

Not that I'm necessarily the right person to review it. Sure, I've got a Twitter account that I use pretty much to promote my books, if a little half-arsed (although I do post my blog entries there), and I do have three FB accounts, but don't tell Facebook. If they find out that not all of their accounts are real and unique it could affect their share price, bless them. Why three? Well there's the mandatory one I can share personal stuff with family - a bit one way as I forget to look let alone post, one to promote my books (and perhaps the one that linked you to this entry, via that Twitter posting), and then there's the one I run on behalf of the criminal mastermind B L O'Feld, megalomaniac owner of B L O'Feld Megalomaniac Industries (BLOMI) as he's rather busy cooking up evil plans to destroy the planet. If you haven't met Barry Liam O'Feld then why not take a peek at his website (link at foot of this blog) or take a loom at Project: Evil, the nook of world domination gone wrong, all on sound project management principles.

Yet I never felt the compunction to utilise Google+ to promote my books. Maybe the failing was mine, apparently it's the second largest social network on the planet but largely so because you can't do anything on Google these days without pushing the 'oh go on, enrol me' button first. Google are saying goodbye to the guy who has made Google+ work, or actually hasn't, which I guess is why he's leaving, but maintain that they are stripping enough of our data from the technically defunct social network without it actually becoming popular - or even known about, come to that, anyway. So that's ok, as long as they're monetising my data, I don't mind.

Actually I do mind, a little bit, but realise I can't do much about it apart from setting my circles into a terminal spiral. It's not like I can try and 'monetise' my books through Google - according to Google Books I don't exist. So promoting my new book, Assassin, released on 1st May through Apple, B&N, maybe Amazon if I time it right, on Google is unlikely, unless you include Blogger. But who reads blogs?

I guess I'll consign Google+ to the attic, along with Billy Preston (who also played the organ on 'Let It Be' for the Beatles in an earlier phase of his career, BTW). The difference is that one day I'll get the Billy Preston LP down and give it a spin. That one will go around on circles.

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Google Circles on Twitter

I think I get Facebook.  It took a while and I'm more of a voyeur than a doer, but it makes a kind of sense.  For me, the thing that makes the most sense is that in the main you are swapping information, whether that is personal, generic, family, humorous, pithy, witty or sad with people you know, if only tangentially.  Of course it allows you to share such moments with perfect strangers too, but unless you are a famous media star or struggling author you probably wouldn't, would you?

But Twitter is a different beast altogether.  Perhaps if we just allowed ourselves to form a tidy Twitter group, a collection of like minded people who we could share 140 character gems with several times a day, it would be a bit more like Facebook.  But we don't stop at friends and family - partly because Facebook is already seen by our nearest and dearest as the main portal for sharing this kind of information.  I very much doubt is anyone has a Twitter list of followers composed mainly of family, friends and work colleagues, whereas most FB accounts are made up mainly of those people.

And of course Twitter has this counting thing, or maybe collecting thing, where it becomes imperative to collect followers, like we're all destined to be a Svengali like character.  Some people have thousands of followers - I know because I'm one of them.  One of the thousands of followers, that is.  My list of followers is a lot more modest.  Some of us are very selective who we follow, because the person involved is famous, or shows promise, or looks capable of writing interesting or funny tweets.  Most of us demonstrate the above selection skills and do follow people because of all those reasons and maybe more, but to be fair most of the people we follow we do so because they followed us or we took an arbitrary chance.  And there's the collecting thing to account for, too.

Nothing with any of these ways of using Twitter are wrong - if we stick only with who we know, who we can recognise and who we agree with then we may as well stick with Facebook.  In fact, I'd like to retract the bit about agreeing with, but all the rest I stand by.  The Twitter way allows us to expose ourselves to the thoughts and memes of strangers, to peek into the minds of people in lands far away and sometimes beyond our experience.  My Twitter account includes red neck gun toting right wingers and liberal minded Democrats, folk that believe in God, UFOs and fairies, not necessarily all at the same time.  Me, I'm a floating voter and believe in hardly anything I can't see, touch and smell, and sometimes some of these people say things I absolutely disagree with, but sometimes they touch my consciousness.  Of course I don't actually read the vast majority of the posts at all, only the ones I see when I dip in.  I'm fairly certain that's true of many Twitter folk, especially those allegedly following 50,000+.

This, of course, is the strength and weakness of Twitter.  If you follow enough people, because they interest you or because they followed you and you want to try and keep it that way, then it becomes difficult to wade your way through the various jokes, bible verses, UFO sightings, fairy folklore, political rants, homilies, promotional plugs, links to blogs (yeah, they're out there too, would you believe it?) and myriad other 140 characters or less wisdom filling up your Twitter stream.  Surely there's a better way.

I think Google might have achieved that, and that's using Google Circles.  With Circles you group the people you connect with into logical groups.  Like one huge Venn diagram intersecting your virtual life.  I've looked at Circles and in many ways it makes absolute sense - you allocate individuals to specific circles and you manage how you interact with each circle, including who you post to within that circle or even across all circles.  It can be as private or public as you want it.

So why isn't it as big as Twitter?  Good question.  I guess the real reason is that it arrived about four years after Twitter did, arriving even after I started social networking - I was a proponent of anti-social networking for quite some time so I've got an excuse, what's Google's? - and I feel that most of us have done the initial investment work in Twitter already.  Specifically, millions upon millions have done the spade work and aren't up for doing it all over again without a good reason.  So for any one of us to abandon Twitter - surely we haven't got enough spare time to play with two similar social networks? - means we have to start building a new set of followers and people we want to follow.  It's a bit of a Catch 22 situation, I reckon.  But it may yet happen unless Twitter gives us tools to partition our followers and those we follow in some way.  There will be many a time we will want to send a message out to everyone who has decided to follow but there are other times when we might want to reach out only to people who follow a certain profile.  And there will be times when we just want to listen to what the UFO community are saying.  It may not be often, but where else is a sci fi writer to get his inspiration from?

So perhaps it's time for Twitter to provide a few more tools to help us partition our lists, otherwise maybe Google will start to eat into Twitter's space.  At the moment I think it is unlikely, but Google can be very persistent about these kinds of things.  Now would be a good time for Twitter to extend the scope of the network.  And to explain what it's there for, while they're at it.


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                                                          Visit my Book Website here

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me