Will Google Plus be the end of social media spam?
Posted by Jeremy on July 6, 2011 · 3 Comments
As I’ve played with Google+ more the past few days, I’ve gotten to know the interface a bit more and am seeing some possibilities. To recap, here’s the review I wrote and here’s a helpful post by Jen Reeves about getting started on G+.
As I said in my previous post, one of the more intriguing features is Circles, which gives you granular control of sharing. You can share with the public, with anyone in any of your circles, or with individual circles. At the same time, the only things you see are from people who have circled you.
So I find myself wondering whether G+ could solve the social media spam problem. You know the drill, those unwanted replies you get on Twitter or random friend or direct message requests on Facebook. On Twitter, for example, I can block someone and keep messages from getting through but I can’t do it until after the fact, and it doesn’t stop spammers from creating new accounts to send me replies.
The G+ interface solves this because it requires both people to circle one another for a message to get through. A user can send me a message either privately or to me in a circle on G+, but I don’t see it if I haven’t circled them back. The only reason I see spammers at all is I get followed by random people I don’t know and have never heard of. A quick profile scan tells me whether they’re worth following, but even if I just ignored new circles I’ve learned with social media that discovery through other peoples’ conversations is better than random follows.
Google gets the benefits of granular privacy controls. By making it opt-in on both ends, it helps you block out things and people you don’t want to see.
This has enormous implications for my journalism students. The ones who have been focused solely on branding themselves well and selling their links will have a lot harder time getting traction in an environment where it’s easier to ignore you. That means you need to make sure that you are building influence by adding real value to the conversation communities of which you want to be a part. That means being knowledgeable, interactive, and producing something original. Branding still matters, but it’s not everything in this kind of environment.
It also makes me think that marketing and PR folks may have to think about their G+ strategy differently. The usual way it works on Facebook or Twitter isn’t going to work on G+, not when blocking makes discovery harder.
It gets more intriguing when you consider that the ability to share with limited circles or even with individuals means that Google+ looms as a personal email killer down the line. The principle is the same: I don’t see messages unless the users have approved of one another. Obviously the fact that G+ will never be universally adopted means this won’t happen anytime soon, but there are possibilities of linking it to Gmail, perhaps, that allow you to approve messages from some email addresses and have them delivered to your Plus interface. It would take some thinking on Google’s end, but I see it as possible without killing the freedom of passing out an email address.
The email spam possibility is probably a pipe dream for now, but that’s one of the things I really like about G+. There is so much that can be connected to this skeleton.
Hmm. Sounds like with the advantages of avoiding spam will come a possible loss of serendipity, which is one of the things I like most about social media. Working on getting my access to Google+ so I can try this out, but my biggest issue right now is that I’m an outlier in that I have virtually no interest except in rare cases of limiting my content only to certain circles. For me the whole joy of social media is crossing the streams, not separating them. I know I’m a weirdo, but I also worry that this is encouraging people to be bland, boring and closed off, sharing interesting stuff only with their close trusted circles – although hopefully a lot of people won’t want to bother with a high level of granularity with most things.
It’s possible we’d lose serendipity, but it still exists in comments on peoples’ posts (Circles doesn’t apply to comments). But discovery is different than Twitter.
Honestly I’d say maybe 5-8% of what I’ve shared on G+ so far hasn’t been done on a limited basis. And I’m much more likely to share publicly than I do on Facebook than I do otherwise. I like that I’m thinking about what I’m sharing and to whom.
There could be negative effects and an echo chamber, but I’d prefer a network has an ethic that allows for granular control than one that doesn’t (and worse, one that says you have control but has been shown to be dishonest about privacy over and over). If you build a network based on trust, I wonder whether that makes people more likely to share publicly (because they share smartly).