Google+ Circles: Humanity's Social Router

I have been trying to wrap my thoughts around  the importance of Google+ circles. The circles idea is to let Google+ users organize their Google+ contacts into different circles. The idea itself is not new; Facebook has let its users organize contacts into different bins for a long time now. The FB avatar of the idea hasn't really been a killer feature; in fact, PC Magazine  published a Google+ circles obituary based on the idea's failure in FB.

Most other features of Google+ are powerful and well planned - like video calling (hang-outs), seamless integration with other Google products (Gmail and You-tube), and a good cross-platform HTML mobile app. Still, Google is touting circles as the key Google+ feature. Why does Google think circles is so important?

Lets look at how Google+ circles affects the users social networking experience. By gently forcing the user to select which circle a new contact should belong, Google+ amortizes the job of categorizing contacts. On the other hand new contacts usually end up in one big "friends" bin in FB. The categorization (or binning) has to be performed later (and this is a tedious task - at least I haven't bothered to do it until now).

With Google+, I've ended up with my contacts being in one of these circles:

Fig. 1: Each circle is a post-box to send messages to a specific contact category.

So now I have a bunch of post-boxes, one corresponding to every circle, where I can post information (pictures/status updates/etc.) and they will get routed to that sub-set of contacts which comprise the circle. This gives me the ability to target information to relevant parts of my social network. I look at this as a social graph routing mechanism. Circles are routing rules that users put in place so that their social message streams are routed appropriately in the social graph.

Google+ is constructing humanity's social router via circles which will be programmed via routing rules defined through the elegant circles abstraction. Yes the same thing can be done with FB, but FB never really tried to make this the center-piece of its product. By gently forcing users to separate relationships via circles, Google+ might just manage to make users feel more confident about selectively routing their social lives with different groups of contacts, rather than blasting messages to everyone they (do or do not) know in their huge FB friend lists. The result should be a more information-rich Google+ social network. With more information comes better advertisement targeting possibilities.

 Users are more concerned about privacy with respect to their contacts (my family should not see what happened in the office holiday party) rather than Google knowing every intimate detail of their lives. A functional social router will implement this wish without coming in the way of Google obtaining user information. No I don't think Google will be more discerning than FB when it comes to monetizing the private information of users, but hey, who cares about user privacy anyway?

Android Device Chatter with the Google Mother Ship

Parts of this post were moved into a formal research study (click link below).


https://sites.google.com/site/sachinkagarwal/home/publications-talks/gis-2011-infocom-2011

Unlearning Google

Figure 2: Light tailed website usage (Click to enlarge)

Figure 1: Google vs. Non-Google properties in my Firefox history (Click to enlarge)

Google's Viacom fiasco is an ominous wake-up call for anyone who cares about his or her online privacy. Today Viacom, tomorrow some other company, another day a government, can arm-twist Google into giving away log data containing user names, IP addresses, keywords, watched content, mouse-clicks, email, and any other information that Google collects.

So far, Google has only used user data for directed marketing. At least it is only about wringing money out of people's thoughts and desires through the ad sense infrastructure. The problem is, the same data can be easily massaged into revealing political, ethical, racial, religious, sexual, and other personal leanings of a person. There may be money to be made out of this data as well, but more importantly, there is the real danger of misusing this information as a pretext for prosecution or blackmail.

Google publicly defends its privacy record. Unfortunately, user privacy is not the most important objective for a publicly traded company. It is shareholder value. And to create shareholder value, a company needs to survive. A determined government can easily make the survival of a company subject to compliance with the government's wish. Google says it "Does no evil". Trouble with this slogan is, who decides what "evil" is?

Another scary scenario can be built around theft of sensitive user data. The media reported that Google is handing over 4TB of You-tube log data to Viacom. Now 4TB is a substantial, but not a lot for future data storage technology: We may have 4TB USB pen drives within the next 5 years. What if one disgruntled employee smuggled this data out of Google and auctioned it off to blackmailers for a few hundred grand?

No easy answers here.

I can keep ranting about Google and privacy and all that, but I am writing this blog on Google property (Blogger)!!! My wife and I are avid Gmail and Orkut and Google Reader and Google search and Google news users. Are we toast? Or, can we wean ourselves from Google?

I parsed our Firefox history over a few weeks to figure out where we stand in terms of Google-to-non-Google websites visited in order to get an idea of our Google dependence. The results are not pretty. Google properties accounted for just over 50% of all the websites visited (Figure 1).

Fortunately, there are non-Google alternatives to all Google applications. So in theory we can start using other applications instead of Google. Off course, there is nothing to guarantee that other websites will not yield to the same pressures as Google. But at least we can spread our web footprint - one entity will not have a complete view of a our web presence as Google does today.

The Firefox history indicated that we visit a few websites often and the rest are rarely visited (Figure 2). The often-visited websites were the usual suspects - search, web-mail, social networking, blogs, and news - and Google dominated this space. This is a great sign because it shows that even though Google is big in terms of visits, it is not very heterogeneous in the content/services it offers. Google is not my bank, not my bookstore, not my voip provider, not my university, and not my community. In fact, if I remove the top-6 Google properties from the data then the distribution starts looking much more uniform. My web log data spread on heterogeneous websites. Doesn't this flavor of obfuscation help privacy?

There may still be hope for privacy on the Internet.