If Facebook is about transparency, Google+ is about organising information

Last week, ahead of watching Social Network on Sony Pix, I read a profile of Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker, written by a journalist called Jose Antonio Vargas. One paragraph that came early in the piece struck me as particularly revealing. After giving us several tidbits he gleaned from Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile, Vargas wrote:

Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.

Read more. [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Google+. Image from Mashable.com”][/caption] Nine months after he wrote about Facebook’s founder (The article’s title: ‘The Face of Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg opens up’), Vargas himself made a startling revelation in a beatifully written story for the New York Times, that he is an illegal immigrant in the nation of immigrants. *** Today, thanks to a good friend, I got an invite to Google+, and while trying to figure out whom to put where in Circles, I couldn’t help thinking about Facebook, and how it differs from Google+ in a fundamental way. Facebook is about transparency. It nudges you to reveal more of yourself. And when you fill your profile up, you tend to ask questions about yourself —your likes, dislikes, political views, interests and personal preferences. At one point, Vargas writes:

Zuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they’re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I’m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources — some of whom might not approve of homosexuality—would see it.

Look at the way Facebook has handled its privacy policies. It’s as if it not only wants us to be more open, it’s as if it assumes we want to be more open, transparent. Google is about organising information. In Google+, the only personal information I filled up was gender, and it quickly took me to Circles. Most of the time was spent organising my friends list. **** Both will evolve. Facebook has changed a lot in the last few years. I assume it will get more and more sensitive to privacy issues, and even today, you can selectively share information on Facebook. Google will introduce new features as well, and maybe start resembling Facebook, not in its design, not in its style, but in its features, and even policies. Who knows? But, now is the time to savour the difference.