I recently twittered the following:
Social media conv. wisdom is to start out really open, but that assumes new space. #buzz is an add to old space. Rules change. #google
And a friend of mine commented on Facebook (I’ve setup my Twitter feed to update my Facebook status):
Doesn’t it seem like Google is copying facebook’s status updates? I don’t see what the big deal is.
So I thought I should elaborate. Without writing a full essay on the topic, the short and sweet is that the whole “privacy concerns” issue that Google is facing regarding Buzz is less about the functionality that they added than it is about where they added it. A real life analogy (perhaps far fetched) is that it’s all fine if you started telling all your friends at a party about who else you have been hanging out with in the past week, but if you started telling all (or many, more than you normally would) of your colleagues about who you’ve been having meetings with that week, it could start to get weird (depending on the culture of where you work). The response to my friend’s question above (which touches on additional observations I regret not having the space in Facebook comments to elaborate on):
I was trying to make a more salient point, which is that Gmail and Facebook are vastly different social spaces. Facebook is the “new space” where the purpose is originally and has always been for social networking. Gmail is traditionally the space for email, which for some people overlaps with “social networking” but for many others do not. As such, Google, by introducing functionality that is more effective when open into a system that is traditionally more closed, is bound to cause conflicts, and users (not the technorati, but normal people) will get confused. In order to address this, they have to abide by the rules of the old territory so to speak, which is to start closed and then open up, which curtails adoption momentum. However, this is offset by broader reach to an already installed base. On the other hand, Facebook started out being a really open space and then only progressively introduced privacy controls. Google by introducing similar functionality into Gmail does not have the luxury of progressively adding privacy controls, but has to have it from day one in order not to confuse and alarm normal users. In a way it’s ironic that Google in this case seems not to be the disruptive innovator but instead the incumbent (reference “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Clayton M. Christensen).
