The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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11:37am on Sunday, 21st August, 2011:
Meta
Friend: the technical term used by Facebook to mean "person".
I don't really use Facebook much, because although I have large numbers of friends on it a huge proportion are there only as a result of my having had to accept them to try out assorted Facebook games. I could cull them, but then I might accidentally cull people who think I know them but I don't really because I only met them once for 15 seconds at a conference and would be unable to pick them out of a line-up even if they were the only individual in it of the right gender.
Google+, on the other hand, lets me sort people out into circles. This is a fairly undeveloped concept at the moment, but its main strength is that connections are unidirectional. If someone circles you, they get to see all your public postings but they won't see any others unless you also circle them and then post so the circle you put them in sees it. Facebook's insistance that every connection between two human beings is of equal importance (or unimportance) does not reflect reality unless you're some kind of social misfit. I'm therefore tempted to use Google+ when I'm not tempted to use Facebook.
Unfortunately, most of what I'd want to post, I already put on QBlog. What I really want to do is put QBlog posts on Google+ as well as on the blog itself. That means I need to use the Google+ API (assuming it has some facility for this kind of thing, which it may well not). As I don't have access to the API, I can't post QBlog to Google+ automatically.
Nevertheless, I'm going to give it a shot manually. When the API finally does appear I'll know whether or not it works out. So, I'm going to cross-post some of my QBlog posts to Google+ to see how it goes, starting with this one.
As a side-effect, it means that all those people who email me asking why I don't have comments on QBlog can comment on Google+ and perhaps then find out the answer.
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Copyright © 2011 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).