Google+ is not a social network; it's The Matrix

Here is the translation of the article of the same name, published on June 4 by Charles Arthur in the section technology-blog from the British digital newspaper «The Guardian», containing an excellent analysis of Google+ and its meaning within the ecosystem of Google. Even though we may or may not agree with the conclusions reached, what is undeniable is that it promotes reflection on an issue that is very much carried and brought up these days; the existence or not of privacy and its implication with the rest of the individual freedoms.

I warn you that any possible mistake in the translation is entirely my own, while all the credit goes to the author, so I recommend to anyone who has the possibility to read the article directly in English for a better understanding.

Google+ is not a social network, it is The Matrix

Try to analyze the volume of activity of Google+ in comparison with Facebook o Twitter produces little useful information - since it does not serve the same purpose as them.

Almost everyone (including myself) has been reading Google+ wrongly. Because it bears many superficial similarities to social media like Facebook o Twitter - you can "befriend" people, you can "follow" people without them following you back - we thought it was a social network, and we judged it on that basis. By that metric, it does pretty badly - little visible engagement, almost no impact on the rest of the world.

Si Google+ If it were a social network, it would have to be said that for one with more than 500 million members - which is about half the size of Facebook, which is colossal - it is to have almost no broad impact. You don't hear outrage at Google+ hate speech or unbanned violent videos, or men posing as 14-year-old girls in order to pretend Friends of real 14 year old girls. Do people send links to Google+ from everywhere, the same way they do in LinkedIn o Twitter o Facebook? No, not really.

There is a simple reason for this. Google+ it is not a social network. Is The Matrix.

Yeah - you know, the one from the movie. The one who knows everything you are thinking, and who guides what you see and your experiences.

Consider the following: if you create a Gmail account, you will automatically receive an account from Google+. Even if you don't do anything with it again, the Google+ It will follow you wherever you have accessed your Google account.

If you weren't signed in when you visited, the first page of Google has a button "SIGN IN" in red and white in the upper right - the main color and the prime location to catch your eye.

¿Maps? If you want to save locations, Google+ pushes it towards you (to share too, although you can avoid it). You have to log into your account Google+ to edit anything with your ease mapmaker. (You have to have an account too to edit OpenStreetMap, although there are a lot of accounts you can use -de OSM, Google, Yahoo, WordPress o AOL)

¿YouTube? It can be used without access (you have a tag of "Sign In" at the top), but of course you can't participate in, for example, comment. Drive? Purchases? Coin purse? The soon-to-come paid music service? Google+ it requires you to log in, so it sees it and records everything.

The reason it doesn't seem like much of a social network is that the "friending" and "following" are just an accidental consequence of what it actually does - it's an invisible layer between the user and the network, which sees what you did and what you did. record and store for future reference.

That's where the part of "Matrix". Next time you're looking for something, or looking on a map, or looking on YouTube, you will see what Google you have decided that they are the "most relevant" results (and of course the "most relevant" ads). If you frequent climate change denial sites, a search on "climate change" will bring up sites run by rational scientists. Whatever your political, sexual or philosophical inclination, if you let Google+ see it, then it will feed you back again. It is the classic «filter bubble«.

(By the way, you can escape from the filter bubble of Google+ using their AJAX API for search, which just returns the "pure" results, as you might have received in, oh, 2007. But not for long. It was due to go "deprecated" in November 2010. It is still working at the time of this writing, but in the future you will have to log in with - you guessed it - an account. Google)

Of course, in the post-Google+, the "most relevant" results are increasingly those that also point to proprietary content. Google. The idea of The Matrix is that there is less and less outside The Matrix. However, some people have noticed. The protest against this version of the search that began in the US in January 2012 was notable: developers of Twitter, Facebook y MySpace teamed up to write a plugin called "Don't Be Evil", which stripped the search of the polarization that Google It seemed to have been added in order to push its product in people's faces and make it appear more popular than it was.

Well, The Matrix doesn't really allow things outside The Matrix, and Facebook, Twitter and (a little less) MySpace they are all beyond their web. And in Europe, the antitrust commissioner Joaquín Almunia, has said that Google he has to make "more concessions" about the way he presents search results - in which he currently gives his properties a lot of prominence - if he wants to avoid a major court battle.

The designs of Google+ about our movements have not gone unnoticed. Ben Thompson, blog author stratechery, has presented Your opinion recently, like Benedict evans, Ender's Analysis in its Google I / O impressions.

Thompson first:

Think about this: what is more valuable (From Facebook) The silly talks, the memes, and the baby photos, or every single activity you do online (and increasingly offline)? Google+ tries to unify all Google services by virtue of a single sign-on, which can be followed through the Internet on each site that serves Google ads, uses Google, connects or uses Google Analytics.

All the features of Google+ - or from YouTube, or Maps or Gmail, or any other service - is intended as a flytrap to make sure you are logged in and registered by Google at all times.

And Evans:

As Microsoft through leverage with Windows from Office, and then Internet Explorer, Google you're leveraging through search, Gmail, Maps, Android, and everything in between, tying them up with Plus.

The goal is not only to index the web but also the users - to better manage the understanding of the data by knowing how and where people use it. This is the point of Google Plus- It is not a social network, but a unified Google identity to tie all your searches, with the use of the Internet in a Google database as PageRank does.

If you want an alternative way of thinking about Google+, you can start with the wonderful metaphor of Horace Dediu comparing what Google does to catching fish:

Google it tries to make a business successful by having a lot of “flow” in terms of data, traffic, queries and information that is indexed. So think about this idea of ​​them tapping into a big river. The greater the volume flowing through the system, the greater the profits it generates.

Given the crudeness of this analogy, I try to sharpen it by saying: imagine it more like a river. And more than a river, like a basin, a river basin. Perhaps a giant basin the size of a continent. The business is, say, catching fish at the mouth of the largest river, before heading out to the ocean in its delta.

And so his work (like Google) is catching fish mostly at one point. It is the most efficient way to catch fish, as it has most of the water flow at that point and the construction of nets is not trivial.

If you use this metaphor, then Google+ puts radio tags on all fish. It is much easier to know where they are going. (Ignore for a moment that you are the fish. You just get in the way.)

The question really is, now that you know, are you comfortable with that? Personally I have always found an option in the center of The Matrix, a puzzling one. The options seem to be: you can either know that the world you live in is a cursed, horrible place with terrible weather, or you can live in what seems to be a pretty comfortable world (as long as you don't mess with the agents, of course ).

To be honest, I've always wondered if people whose "lives" (computer-generated or not) turned upside down by Neo, the pirate hero of the film, would have liked to make that choice for themselves.

Anyway, that's what Google+ about. Talk about it as if it were a social network that has an activity in the form of Facebook y Twitter is not understanding the point. It doesn't really matter if you never use it, you never fill your profile, you never fill a circle, you never add yourself to anyone's circle. What matters to Google is that you are registered, so that a matrix of knowledge about you can be formed.

So now that you know: red pill or blue pill? Do you go in or out?