Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Early reviews from Geek City: Googledouble+ungood

Pennyarcade
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.

Speculation
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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Comments 10

  1. You are the crossbow guy in XKCD and I claim, etc.
    (You are also a dog guy, but “I may not really be your ‘friend,’ but I sure as hell ain’t one of your ‘followers'” could have come out of the mind of any of my cats.)

  2. The best part of CSOTD is the essays sparked by the connections you make.
    I find myself gradually disenchanted with Facebook and other online pseudo-societies. I’m glad they give me an easy way to invite old high school friends over for a BBQ but otherwise the novelty has worn off, the ubiquity of spam and viruses pushes every angry button I have (New Rule: Never click on anything that looks remotely interesting), and it’s a too-seductive time sink. I’d sum up my attitude toward Google Plus as, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
    I acknowledge the irony of posting this note on the website of a friend (not “friend”) I’ve never met in person.
    I don’t know about Mardi Gras, but re: Comic-Con I disagree that “You can’t wall off your experience — you’re there for all of it if you’re there at all.” In fact, walling off is about the only way to survive and enjoy it. Mark Evanier says that Comic-Con is four or five conventions rolled into one and it’s up to you to find “your” convention within it. I go for comics, and the gaming and toy and t-shirts and Hollywood stuff isn’t hard to ignore. That’s just the crap I walk through to reach the ten or twelve aisles (and one or two panels out the eight always going simultaneously) that’s MY Comic-Con. The hundred thousand fans spilling out into a street party is fun atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily have much else to do with me. Except make it impossible to get a hotel room.

  3. … and he can say anything he wants, because when I put him in my circles, he reciprocated. I’m going to give it a few months and then chop off anybody who thinks I’m only here to marvel at their fascinating pensees.

  4. And Brian, I count having to walk through the crowd as not being able to wall off my own experience. Admittedly, I occasionally get in the middle of a crowd and have a sudden need to not be there, but even in my more measured moments, there’s no way I can ignore the guy yapping behind me in the movie theatre, much less a huge crowd of people dressed up as Star Wars characters and furries.

  5. You’d feel differently after meeting your first 6-foot-3 Supergirl with a smashing figure and Adam’s apple.

  6. Now, there’s a proposition I’m in a real hurry to test.

  7. I take it you don’t use the twitter yourself. Too bad I was going to follow you. 😀

  8. I’m only interesting once a day, Rob.
    Of course, that may turn out to be three or four more times a week than a lot of people who ARE on Twitter, but …
    You remember that joke that ends with the kid saying, “I know there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere?” That kid would have loved Twitter.

  9. Facebook’s friend/not-a-friend model is a tricky one, because it allows for only one type of social bond, and assumes only one type of usage of these sites.
    It’s a problem better illustrated by sites like Livejournal, where users have been grumbling for years. (No, Facebook did not invite friending/friends lists/etc.) Some users keep diaries full of private thoughts, and some keep blogs full of essay material. There’s no different model for usage, though, that would allow the diarist to subscribe to the blogger’s essays without letting HIM read personal updates intended for family only, or that would allow the blogger to give the diarist access to non-public NSFW materials without also flooding his reading page with tales of Grandpa’s goiter. The diarist can jump through some hoops on a post-by-post basis to let only certain people read, the blogger can jump through some hoops to filter out the family chatter, but it doesn’t make up for the lack of a social bond vs. subscription difference built into the system.
    According to the friend who invited me to try out Google+, that’s the appealing bit–it’s Facebook without the assumption that everyone is your college pal or wants to read about Grandpa’s goiter. She can share cat photos with friends without bothering co-workers, talk shop with co-workers without boring friends, and post new house photos to family without opening it up to more casual acquaintances. There are hoops to accomplish these things in Facebook, but it’s built into Google+.

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