CSotD: Early reviews from Geek City: Googledouble+ungood
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Penny Arcade is one of the major commercial successes in web comics. I realize "commercial success" can sound condescending in some contexts, but I mean it in a complimentary sense here: The strip is well-drawn, breaks some rules and attracts the kind of geek audience that hangs out on the Internets. In addition, its creators have always been responsive to their audience, not simply producing a cartoon that pleases that demographic but then creating a forum in which their fans can feel part of a community.
In short, they do everything the guys in How To Make Webcomics tell you to do, and they were doing it well before that respected guide (which was written by some other commercially successful webcartoonists) came out.
The point being, there are other webcomics that are better drawn or that touch upon more sublime subject matter or that are more mature in their approach, but Penny Arcade hits the audience that is online, and, if you're going to be an online comic strip, that's a pretty critical thing to do.
So when the guys at Penny Arcade start bagging on Google+, it's worth not just a laugh but a listen.
I've been on Google+ for a couple of weeks now, not long enough to really understand it, but long enough to start to feel that something is missing.
"Facebook but with way less people" is a case of putting a pretty good punchline in the first panel. And part of the problem is, indeed, the lack of population. It's the opposite of the Yogiism, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Nobody goes there because there's nobody there, which is the bane of every startup, whether it's an on-line site or a new restaurant.
Facebook had a chance to get up and running without a whole lot of people watching and judging it. By the time it burst on the larger scene, it was already a Thing and people were stepping into a community that already existed.
And with ComicCon just ended in San Diego, there's an apt analogy to that Yogiism that doesn't have to be reversed to be relevant — like Mardi Gras, it was there years before it became a Thing, and there has long since developed a sense among many of those who had been there earlier that "nobody goes there because it's too crowded," that becoming a Thing was the end of something special and that it was time to move on.
But where to? And is it a practical issue, or one of snobbery?
There is, to start with, the snobbery aspect of not wanting to share ComicCon or Mardi Gras with the great unhip, but there is also the practical issue of it simply being too damn crowded, rowdy and off-topic.
The difference is, you can't do much about the crowds, noise and chaos of ComicCon and Mardi Gras. You can't wall off your experience — you're there for all of it if you're there at all.
Facebook may be noisy, crowded and chaotic in total, but, with judicious pruning, you can still have a reasonably well-governed experience there — simply hide the Farmville posts, disable all apps in your privacy settings and defriend the people who can't resist passing along stuff you don't want to see.
So part of the challenge facing Google+ is creating a need. If it becomes a geek hangout, well, that's one path to a type of success, but the kinds of numbers that can make a webcomic wildly successful won't pay for the coffee service at Google+. And getting people to migrate in large numbers from Facebook to Google+ is going to take more than a sense that newer is better.
Which leads to the observation that Penny Arcade is not the only geeky, highly successful webcomic to take a swipe at the new kid today.
When the geeks are snickering, it's a bad sign.
When Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam and declared the war unwinnable, Lyndon Johnson famously noted that, if they had lost Cronkite, they had lost the American people, but that shouldn't be interpreted to give the rooster credit for the sunrise. It meant that, when the grumbling got to that point, it was an indicator of how deep it really went.
As said above, it really doesn't matter how the geeks — who absolutely hated America Online from its very start — feel about Google+, nor should a pair of snarky cartoons suggest that it is a failure even among their group.
But xkcd is correct that there's no reason to expect your Auntie Grizelda to move her Facebook account over to Google+, and, as Penny Arcade suggests with its "Google-" gag, there is a basis for suspecting that Google+ is simply a vanity site.
So here's what this non-geek thinks of Google+ so far:
I don't get it.
I don't feel that anything important is happening over there. And some of what I see doesn't work for me, for reasons that maybe won't resonate with everyone but which are echoed to some extent in both these comics today, but mostly in Penny Arcade.
As far as I see so far, it doesn't create community. It's not a "social network" in the sense of Facebook. It's more like Twitter, and, by the way, that brings into question the need for it, since I gather that Twitter does a pretty good job of being Twitter.
And, like Twitter, it's a minibroadcasting service.
Which is a polite way of saying it's an opportunity to have yourself spammed with self-selected promotional announcements.
When you send a "friend" request to someone at Facebook, their choices are binary: they can either accept or reject your friendship. They either create a social bond with you or they must choose not to.
Granted, if you "friend" someone with 4,000 other friends, they're not going to see your postings in the swirling chaff of their account. Which makes me suspect that some of those Facebook superstars "hide" the vast bulk of their "friends," or — which I also suspect — they post from their smartphones and never actually spend any time at Facebook doing more than monitoring responses to their own posts.
And I'm using a lot of quotation marks here because there is something about the concept of a "friend" you don't listen to that demands quotation marks.
Meanwhile, however, whether those superstars are aware of your presence or not, others on Facebook are, and you can have a very full on-line social life chatting up old high school friends, keeping in touch with cousins and making friends with strangers who have said interesting things or responded to interesting things you've said. That's what a social network is.
With Google+, however, there is no mutuality. When I add you to my circles, you are under no compulsion to add me to yours. As I understand it (and someone will correct me if I'm wrong) you could sit there with nobody in any of your circles, endlessly prattling away about your latest products and services and never see any input from anybody except for their comments on your own postings.
Google-, in other words.
Or Twitter, in which people who tweet don't have "friends," but have "followers."
Yeah, well, I may not really be your "friend," but I sure as hell ain't one of your "followers."
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