Thursday, July 28, 2011

Google Plus thinks I am a social climber...

Google plus has a suggestion process as to who you might add to "circles".

Here - with only minor editing - are five consecutive suggestions made to me:

You see this right. Three of them are Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg in order.

I know none of these people though Zuckerberg shares a single Facebook friend with me and I know someone who was in his computer science classes at Harvard.

Google + is getting users fast - and I find myself looking at Facebook much less - but is the appeal of Google + the asymmetric friending process where I can add people like this to my "circles" and pretend that I am far better connected and far more upwardly mobile than in reality?

For comment.


John

PS. Does anyone else think it is strange that Zuckerberg winds up in my Google + suggested circle so fast?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, the fact that you add Zuck to your circle doesn't mean you're 'connected'. This is more analogous to following someone on Twitter. I personally follow plenty of people who probably don't even know I am following them, but for me it's a source of insight/news/links, etc (tech journalists, entrepreneurs, etc).

L. U. said...

I suspect that it has nothing to do with your connection to "the trio". Rather, your friends who you have already added on G+ are following some of these three so G+ is suggesting them to you as well.

Due to the mutual nature of "FB friendship", celebrities will have many more G+ (unilateral) followers than FB friends.

Anonymous said...

Now it all makes sense since we're the ones who gave Zuckerberg the idea for brontecapital.blogspot.com.

You'll be hearing from our lawyers.

Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss

John Hempton said...

I have a mutual friend with the Winklevoss's too... but he was an olympic rower - so that sort of makes sense.

The modern world is a strangely connected place.

J

Richard said...

The "strange" connectedness of the world my go a long way to explaining its collective stupidity.

polit2k said...

Welcome, I've added you to one of my circles so you are really famous now or I am or ... what the hell. Have fun:-)

Anonymous said...

Let me guess.

Tom is also your friend on MySpace.

AAA said...

The appeal for me is that it's NOT Facebook. Google privacy leaves some to be desired, but I got tired of occasionally going to Facebook's privacy settings to learn new options they have set to automatically share my info.

My first time using Google+ saw me lose a two paragraph comment - I'll give it another shot in a couple weeks.

Anonymous said...

I got Page and Zuckerberg as suggestions. I know neither of them and am a nobody and have no connections to them so who knows...

Rahul Deodhar said...

Hah! I think they appear on everyone's follow list. Having Mark zuck. on the list could be sort of a Google joke or something. If you want to follow someone from google, Marissa Mayer is better bet.

That you can follow the public activities of who so ever you want makes G+ a better option than FB.

BTW your comment on AUD being overvalued and hence you considering non-AUD investments has me thinking a lot.

Ben said...

Zuckerberg shows up in a lot of people's friend lists for Google+, I'm not sure why but I have gotten the recommendation as have a few of my friends.

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