Facebook has gone out of vogue. It’s no longer cool. Nothing says “I’m hip” right now like “I don’t have a facebook account”.

There’s actually good reasons for that. I remember the very early days of AOL and the moment it struck me that AOL was nothing more than a gated community – with an annoying landlord named Steve Case who demanded I read what he says before I could get into my house. The lack of freedom and the lack of exclusivity made it one giant cesspool of new internet users. The bottom line was that even though I met many new friends via AOL, I found my life was better without it. I cancelled it, and never missed a second of it.

Facebook has become AOL with a better interface, a nicer way to share photos, and millions more people. Along comes Google+, who has the advantage of identifying and fixing the issues that make facebook a place I can’t wait to leave. The fact that Google+ got 10 million users in a very short period of time is proof that there is a huge demand out there for a facebook alternative. Could Google+ be it?

The Google+ Circles feature solves a ton of problems for me over facebook. With Circles, I can separate my friends, family and people I barely know, and I can separate them as well by political ideology. Bottom line, I can compartmentalize my life a little. We can discuss all day if that is a good idea or not, but for me it works.

The interface is a tiny bit kludgy right now on Google+, but in the weeks I’ve been on it, the Google team is making very quick changes to it, and all of them have been for the better. The photo upload, albums, sharing… is all MUCH better than facebook.

Google+ is not without some problems; I don’t like how much information they want from me, when I already think Google knows way too much about all of us now. But it’s optional, so you don’t have to give it to them. The +1 button? I’m not liking that, no pun intended.

But if Mark Zuckerburg isn’t crapping his pants right now, he should be. Google has real money and real resources to make this work. Zuckerburg’s money is all built on ridiculous valuations that are basically a house of cards. If a mass-exodus has already begun on facebook, it will take just months for him to lose millions and millions of users… and facebook will quickly become MySpace II. There is real demand out there for this, and it appears Google is responding to it faster and better than facebook.

We’ll see. In any case, one of them has to lose. With so many options on where to put your information out there it becomes overwhelming… people will seek to simplify and that means cutting out services that are not making your life better.

And remember, with everyone of the social sites out there, someone else owns the property you are parking your information house on. You’re better off having a central website that you own and can update and style anyway you choose.. then send people back to your site with a link from all the services where you are sharing information.

That’s my 2 cents for today.. more as I play with Google+ and cancel my facebook account(s).

If you are a Podomani client and would like a Google+ invite, shoot me an email.

UPDATE: Facebook gets and “F” in Customer Satisfaction. Even the airlines did better. Customers don’t like the interface changes, the increasing concerns about privacy, and the expanding use of advertising.

I confess I just started tweeting recently. I had been watching Twitter out of curiosity for a long time before I decided to jump in.

The more I looked at it the more I found it to be … well, random bragging about your unexceptional life. As best described in this SuperNews cartoon.

Slowly but surely I find myself replacing my daily blog reading habits with Twitter. I have a bunch of RSS feeds and a long list of bookmarked blogs. But I find myself just checking in on my Twitter page. Almost everyone I am following on Twitter is someone who has a blog I was checking almost daily.

Some of the blogs I followed are done be exceptionally good writers and story tellers. I would much rather read a full blog posting or story from these people than just a Tweet – and many of these people have already effectively figured out how to Tweet and get my attention – and then I’m off to their blog to read the full story.

For the other blogs I check out… Twitter helps me avoid wasting time scanning through their blogs. Twitter forces them to get to the point – thank God.

So has Twitter killed blogging? Not yet. But with our ever shorter attention spans … it’s got a shot.

My first blog was a little website I did for fun way back in the late 1990′s before the word “blog” existed. I mused about web development, my guitar and studio gear collection, some other hobbies, and life in general. To my surprise, the traffic on the site climbed with every post.

I split off the most popular part of that first site and since then I have blogged almost every day (or at least every week) on it. It’s been a pretty amazing experience. While 98% of the experience has been positive, the 2% negative was tough – at first.

All things considered, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. We’ll talk more about that website in posts to come.

If you’ve been thinking about getting your company or yourself into blogging, I can highly recommend “Blog Rules – A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues” by Nancy Flynn. The book will guide you through many of the issues and give you a firm footing to start blogging from.

We’ll be talking about the various aspects of blogging here in the days to come, as well as many other aspects of life on the web. Enjoy.

Larry Preston