I firmly believe that if any company can dethrone Facebook, that company is Google. But from what I’ve seen of Google+ so far, I can’t quite imagine a MySpace-style emigration happening just yet.

I’ve recently been asking Google+ fans to give me a good reason to use it. By far the most popular answer to my question is that it provides better privacy and filtering options.

Circles is great. It’s about as simple to use as it can be, but I don’t believe it’s anything like a game-changer.

Facebook already has friend lists

In terms of who you share with, Facebook has had ‘friend lists’ for some time. Not only does Facebook have these, but it also allows ad hoc exclusions for individual posts. I can share something to my ‘Family’ list, but exclude Mum if I choose to. As far as I can see, G+ doesn’t support this. Of course Google can add it in future, but my point is that the Circles concept is not a USP; it’s just centre-stage and has a better UI.

Nobody knows about friend lists anyway

Facebook friend lists appear to be a little-known, or at least little-used feature. This is possibly due to being somewhat hidden, and this in turn is possibly because Facebook don’t really like you to be particularly private.

Facebook have already reacted to G+ by surfacing these features through an improved UI. If they think they’re likely to lose users to G+ on account of Circles then they can bring Friend Lists into greater prominence. They’re in a strong position to do so; they already have the infrastructure and I doubt that most of their audience even know about G+ yet.

It’s complicated

I’ve used lists a lot. I have lists of people who live near me, lists of my closest friends, list of people I have professional connections with; even lists of people I follow on Twitter. Managing these lists is not just time consuming, but it’s much more complicated that it sounds. As soon as you opt to conduct yourself in this way you start seeing how difficult it really is.

Life is more complicated than putting people into neat little pigeon holes with labels on them. Have you ever tried to throw a party and only invite people from a certain corner of your life? There’s always a guest you have to invite for ‘political’ reasons, or a guest who won’t come unless some other person is there; or isn’t there. You probably like some of your work colleagues while thoroughly disliking others. It’s never as straight-forward as you’d hoped.

And then there’s the great ‘offline’ loophole. Maybe I want to share something with just the boys, but my brother is checking Facebook while sat next to his wife. All the privacy settings in the world can’t get around that.

So, I gave up. I only maintain a single list nowadays.

If something really needs to be hidden from people then you probably shouldn’t be writing it on the Internet anyway. (not that I take my own advice).

But Circles filters your Stream too.

This is a good feature. I prefer it to Facebook’s obscure Edgerank algorithm, or whatever mysterious methods they’re currently using to filter your News Feed. References to ‘top stories’  (or ‘highlights’ as they seemed to be called last week), or News Feed vs Most Recent feeds – it’s all rather confusing and I think Facebook need to sort it out.

The point is that they can sort it out. If Facebook users start adopting friend lists in greater numbers, then perhaps Facebook will support lists in the News Feed settings. Perhaps they’ll make these settings more prominent too, as they’re currently hidden at the bottom of an infinitely scrolling page, such that you have to hit the ‘End’ key to reach it.

All of this is solvable by Facebook, and what’s more they can learn from what the early adopters say about G+ before the majority of their user base are even aware that it exists.

Do people even want privacy?

This is the ultimate question in my mind. Social networks offer privacy features because enough of us demand them, but I’m not convinced that privacy is so important to the average Facebook user that they’d jump ship to improve it. If Facebook friend list adoption doesn’t increase after some UI changes, then perhaps it’ll be because people aren’t that interested in the feature, or have found it as complex as I have. Even if people say they want this functionality, will they actually use it?

I’d like to eat my own words on this front, but I see little evidence that orthodox privacy concerns are of much importance to ordinary users. Perhaps Google would do well to observe how teenagers appropriate their own privacy techniques regardless of the tools designed for them by adults.

Circles isn’t a killer feature

It’s not like Google aren’t innovative. In addition to their wide range of indispensable services, they will eventually have a the browser, the mobile and maybe even the desktop sewn up. But a social hub that ties all of this together is going to need a killer USP to start a Facebook exodus, and I don’t think we’ve seen it yet.

Whether Circles is better than Facebook’s privacy model or not, I think Google need to get better at coming up with social features we actually want, even before we know it ourselves. This is one of Facebook’s great strengths and I’m not sure Google are too great at it.

Facebook in your pocket

I’ve half joked about this numerous times – The likelihood that Facebook will produce a physical device that carries your ID; a device that allows you to make payments, sign into other devices, etc.. A quick Google shows I may not be completely insane after all – Facebook flirts with RFID.

The images to the right are the product of my questionable Photoshop®­­ skills and paranoid imagination. But am I crazy?

We (the UK) are a country that said “no to ID” . If asked, most of us will probably say we dislike the concept of a Big Brother state, and yet we are more than happy to surrender our identity to Silicon Valley in exchange for some neat sharing tools. Facebook is aggressively collecting mobile phone numbers, and credit card numbers. They know your name, your location, your employer, your family and friend connections, and obviously what you look like. They already have the foundation of a virtual currency and [I'd imagine] have enough data on most of us to run a pretty decent credit check.

So, do we really object to the concept of carrying around identification? I’m willing to bet that if Facebook incentivises us to carry our ID around on a physical device, we’ll lap it up. Incentivising us to use features we didn’t know we needed is something that they’re rather good at.

I’m aware that this smacks of the various RFID conspiracies coming out of America, and whatever you do, don’t Google “Facebook CIA”. I’d better digress before the black vans come.

Death of the address bar

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the URI is on its way out as a way for normal people to interact with the web.

If you want an indication that there is a trend in this direction, take a look at the top search terms of 2010. “Facebook login” is up seven places on last year, from ninth to second-most searched term. What does this mean? It means people in general do not want to use the URI as a user interface. It also means most people don’t use bookmarks, even for something they use every day.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee defines the World Wide Web as an application that runs on the Internet. A useful distinction, but it seems it isn’t destined to remain an application that humans use as directly as they have in the past. Abstraction will continue to creep in. There has been [for some time] an application running on top of the web – it’s called Search, and it has won.

We can debate whether this user-friendliness is for our benefit, or whether it’s just the corporations dumbing us down, so we increasingly depend upon them. But I shan’t bother to argue that, because I feel it’s inevitable anyway – there’s no fighting progress.

So my prediction for 2013 is that the address bar will be at most an optional feature of the next generation of web browsers, a feature only used by developers and old fogeys, like me.

Consumer OS

When I first started using the Web (in the late ’90s) the distinction between being online, and being offline was very clear. Firstly, you had to sign into your ISP, and secondly you had to launch a web browser program (as we more-or-less still have to). It was also very clear when you were accessing data or applications on your local system, and when you were accessing data, or applications on the Internet.

This distinction is eroding. And we are at a pretty significant cross-roads.

Google, above all other consumer-facing technology firms, seem to be making the strongest moves to obliterate the distinction between browser and desktop. Chrome OS takes away the “headaches of [using] ordinary computers” (thank God).  Not only does this (along with Apple’s Mac App Store) move the proprietary app store trend along from being strictly ‘mobile’, but it points to some other pretty incredible paradigm shifts too. How about a persistent social layer for your browser? In fact, why bother signing in and out of Google at all? Why even be concerned with whether you’re ‘on Google‘, ‘on the Internet‘, or even ‘in a browser‘? – you’re just living your life. We all use multiple devices  nowadays, but even the iPhone seems archaic with its manual syncing rigmarole. How great if  “your stuff was just there”? (There Google, you can have that slogan for free).

This seems a natural progression of consumerised computing, which has been going on for decades. The word ‘Cloud’ is already being drummed into consumers’ heads, despite it being in its infancy even in the IT industry. Microsoft’s “To the Cloud” ad campaign has hit UK television screens, and the word ‘Cloud’ itself [with all its meaningful meaninglessness] continues to be an irritating marketing buzz word.

So my prediction for 2013 – Desktop machines (assuming we still want those) will ship with a choice of totally locked down operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, or Google (at least there’s choice). Installing software from their proprietary stores will make installing your own software (from a DVD, or dodgy download site), look seriously Cyberpunk! It seems unlikely that even Google will create a social network to rival Facebook, so I expect all these offerings will have persistent, transparent Facebook integration.

After scrounging myself a B-list Google Wave preview, I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so. Rather than read more and think deeply about it, I thought I’d blurt out my half-formed opinions now. In fact, this is one of those posts I’ll probably regret in a year’s time. It might look as naive as some of my early thoughts on Twitter when I didn’t quite get it, but that’s blogging for you… so here goes.

Comparison with existing paradigms

When a new service comes along, it’s normal to bring along preconceptions from services you’re already comfortable with. New Twitterers tend to bring their Facebook habits, because they’re pretty similar right? Well it’s natural anyway; how else can you understand something so abstract? Look no further than email which is not much different from sending a letter in the post. This probably accounts for its widespread adoption by even the least technical of people.

The situation with Google Wave at the time of writing is that nobody really knows what they’re doing. There are no hardened Wavers to learn from, everyone is a n00b. So how do we use it? If I wrote this blog in a wave you could edit it, so it’s a wiki? It looks more like a discussion forum, but there’s an inbox, so it’s more like email? One of the KSPs is that the whole thing is real-time, so it’s a chat room?

The way I described Google Wave to Public was “MSN on steroids has a love child with Facebook”. I will undoubtedly regret this statement before long, if not already. The fact is that these preconceptions are not that useful. They may get us off to a flying start, but they constrain us to habits which may mask the format’s real potential. First and foremost, it’s a real-time medium, but it brings with it some associations that we may do well to shake off.

Google Wave as chat client

Of all the comparisons we might make, its most common adoption initially seems to be chat – Most of us are just using it like MSN. It’s far too easy to do this because the real-time element is so compelling. However, as soon as you fall into this trap you find things that break the model. How do you know when the person is online? How do you end a conversation when it stays in your “inbox” forever? These may only be superficial features that need to be addressed, but maybe not – maybe we’re just missing the point – it’s just not a chat room and we just need to get over that.

Google Wave as email

We are well used to the idea of sending messages that won’t get an immediate response. The etiquette of email may not be perfect, but at least it’s universally understood as an asynchronous exchange. You send an email in the same way you send a letter – it leaves your control and your copy is literally that. Eventually you may receive a new message.

Google Wave has a kind of inbox, although this familiar term is less useful when you realise it’s also an outbox. The process of starting a wave can appear similar to email – you add the addressee[s] and fire it off for their attention. As with email, your recipients may not be online but that’s not a requirement for sending an email; you don’t even need to know.

Perhaps the idea of basing electronic mail so closely on paper-based mail was a temporary solution that is well out of date and well overdue a successor. Google must want to fix this – Certainly Microsoft tried to fix email in the form of Microsoft Exchange, but that’s another blog post and I don’t want to get upset right now.

Google Wave as living document

A Wave need not be correspondence at all; it can just be a document. You can just publish it, whatever that means. Maybe you’ll add collaborators later when you’re ready. Maybe you’ll make it public and tag it with keywords. So in this sense it is more like a wiki, but let’s stop with the comparisons – Ultimately it’s what ever you want it to be – in Google’s own words:

“Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.”

The real-time shift

The biggest issue that underpins conversation around Google Wave is the web’s apparent evolution from archive to a real-time medium. However, I think even this distinction is something we have to get over. There’s a reason we no longer refer to the Internet as the “information super highway” … we know it’s full of information, so we don’t need to bang on about it all the time. Eventually the novelty of real-time will be as transparent as it is in the real world. Your consciousness and your memory are not mutually exclusive – you kinda need them both.

I think Google Wave will play a big part in continuing this blend of time and data, much like Twitter has started to do. It’s no secret that Google Search is not so hot when it comes to up-to-the minute data. They have certainly made improvements in this area, but their search index is fundamentally an archive.

The most exciting changes Google Wave brings about probably won’t be in the Wave client that we’re currently mucking about with – I can’t wait to see what developers start doing with gadgets, and bots and most importantly the underlying Wave protocol, but that’s another post.