rgbFilter » Why did I join Google+?

Why did I join Google+?

By Laroquod on 14 Jul 2011

All the smoke clears and then you realise that not only have you, blithe and insane, signed up for ‘Facebook: The Sequel’ but This Time It’s Personal: it’s invaded all your most important shit. Sure, there’ll be More Chills and More Spills, but there will also be Even Less Time Spent on Character.

I didn’t understand +1s at all until I realised that they conflate two not-very-related things: favouriting entire URLs vs. upvoting individual items on the page. It’s not sensible, but it IS just like Facebook. Just. Like. Facebook. This place stinks of it. So why is everybody all gaga over Googoo? Circles were in Diaspora. G+ is just not an exciting development. It’s not innovative. It’s not smart and it’s not elegant. It’s just Facebook with the coating of slime (temporarily?) removed, and that’s great, I’m glad. The slime is why I quit Facebook.

But I wasn’t excited about the potential of FB anymore when I quit, anyway, and this is just Part 2 of that played-out tale. G+ is important only because something like Facebook must exist and now it doesn’t have to be actual Facebook — that’s the whole of it.

Or, as XKCD says so succinctly…