GooglePlus is dominating my RSS feeds today. My excitement about Circles has faded a little because of articles like this:

Google Plus’ Circles System May Not be Sustainable — ReadWriteWeb

I posted an abridged version of the following in the article’s comments:

Good categorization is an expertise most people lack: “Work” isn’t particularly meaningful, but “Coworkers”, “Headhunters”, and “Professional Acquaintances” are. It’s more work to apply and maintain a richer taxonomy, and I’d imagine even fewer people will get equivalently greater value from such effort in social networking. We’ve been trained away from finding exactly what we want by the search-and-browse approach of unstructured searches like Google, so wading through irrelevancy is a more common skill.

Grouping mechanisms in other social networking systems also have upkeep problems; I suspect most people just don’t bother doing it, and the same will probably be true with GooglePlus. Maybe adding a feature to display circles as Venn diagrams would help data geeks like me.  For most people, public versus private might be just enough categorization to avoid social networking faux pas without making the posting process feel like taking the SAT.

Existing social networks don’t have the concept of categorization on both ends, posting and reading, and I wonder if GooglePlus Circles has the same deficiency because it hides the names of circles I’ve been added to. I’d like to subscribe to (and filter out) people’s circles instead of people themselves to control the noise of their posts about unshared interests; I’d probably disagree with how most of my non-professional acquaintances would categorize me. It doesn’t sound like GooglePlus makes the distinction of subscribing to people’s interests or topics instead of people themselves. Relevancy has to be a two-way street.

Or, perhaps, a four-way intersection.

GooglePlus Venn: Relevancy is an Intersection

With all those brainy data geeks at Google, I’m optimistic that they could create a Venn diagram of Circles, Sparks, +1′s, Reader Likes/Shares that could define social graph relevancy in that oh-so-Google statistical way. How many licks would it take to get to the center of that tasty relevancy tootsie-pop?  Lots, probably, but it creates a new kind of payoff that Twitter and Facebook are incapable of delivering.

Hey, Google, are you listening?

On a related note, I tried posting my comment using my Twitter account. Twitter on the web is totally brain-dead about multiple identities, so of course I posted my comment using the wrong account. It’s a perfect example of the mis-post problem I referenced in the preceding post. Then I reposted my comment using Google, and Disqus allowed me to choose from the three Google accounts I’m logged into right now. Google gets the issues of identity and context more than anybody else in the field, so I’m (somewhat) optimistic about GooglePlus.

Putting aside enough time to honor your New Year’s resolutions?  A good extra New Year’s resolution might be to avoid everything on this list from ReadWriteWeb:

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out – ReadWriteWeb 

The prevailing wisdom (Folklore?) is that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nodes: See Metcalfe’s law and the less-familiar, more optimistic Reed’s law.  That might be true of the potential of the entire network, but what about the value to a particular node, i.e., individual?  Mobile networks being geocentric will have much-smaller pockets of useful nodes due to population density and market popularity–think Orkut in Brazil.

They’re all competing for the same thing–my time–with often-redundant features.  Cross-posts helps: This blog goes to Linkedin and Twitter; Twitter, Facebook, and Brightkite cross-post to each other.  However, I often ignore cool features to cater to the least common denominator among my network of networks. There’s also the occasional SNAFU like when a blog bulk edit pushes dozens of bad posts to each.  Diminishing returns rapidly give way to value lost with too many active networks, cross-posting or not.

Right now we’re in the Cambrian Explosion of social networking; such booms rarely end well for the participants.  How many of ReadWriteWeb’s 10 will only be remembered in the fossil record of such articles?