“The agency of humans, as they interact with, as, and within technologies, is driven home by the network-segmenting feature of Google+. Engagement with the internet is necessarily a multi-sited endeavor, and so the agency that we practice within one space will inevitably transfer, in some form, to other physical and digital spaces. As such, Facebook users’ agency seems to have spilled over into a new platform. Within this platform, Google+ users (supposedly) need not subvert the system to obtain the privacy and selectivity that they want. Instead, the structure of Google+ has Facebook users’ agency directly built in.”

From “Structured Agency: Facebook and Google+”

To be honest, the thought of migrating over my social network to another platform exhausts me. But I readily admit that my general feelings about Facebook amount to little more than the platform serving as ‘pimped out’ email. Still, this ‘control’ aspect of Google+ is interesting and very promising. It’s a smart and subtle way for Google+ to differentiate itself from Facebook. The question that remains is how advertising is going to work into Google+. I envision something like a hybrid between Google’s paid advertising network plus the content network plus Facebook’s new “comment ads.” The way Google handles the integration of advertising into Google+, especially how much ‘agency’ it allows users to exercise over being able to ‘opt’ out of ads, is going to have a large impact on its success and user adoption. 

Notes

  1. scienceisgreat reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  2. notational reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  3. modernandmaterialthings posted this