For the past week, I’ve been running a small experiment. I’ve been mirroring most of my Twitter and Facebook posts to Google+ to see how the different communities respond. The result: Google+ makes me happier.
The disclaimers: This is just me, your mileage may vary. Google+ is a still a new and closed system. These results may look very different in a month. And most importantly, I believe that the quality of a social network service has a lot more to do with who’s on it than the technology behind it.
But still, there’s something about Google+ that is very soothing to the ego. From Twitter, Google+ borrows the broadcast model of distribution: Anybody can follow the public posts of a Google+ user, just as anyone can follow everything posted into a public Twitter profile. That means people can like you more than you like them. Lovely.
So I can see now that I have more than 2,200 people following me in Google+, or to use G+ terminology, I’m “in their circles.” There’s no need for me to “encircle” them back, although if any of them want to comment on a Google+ post I make, I’ll see the comments in my stream. I can then add the users I like to my own circles to see everything they want to share. (I’m not a Google+ superstar, by the way. There are other tech media personalities with more than ten times my followers.)
