For those of you who missed it, or procrastinated right by it...November 17, 2010 was declared National Unfriend Day for Facebook members, according to late night host Jimmy Kimmel.
It was a day of amnesty, a way to rid your site of the friends on Facebook that aren’t really friends – the people you wouldn’t even give your phone number today.
But if you’re between November 17ths, there’s a new day and a new game in town.
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Google+.
Think of it as hide and go seek.
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The latest social network from the best-known search engine offered a beta test by invitation only. More than 20 million people are playing a kind of go seek to get a chance to try and get in on the ground floor of the latest competitor to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace.
In advertising-speak, this was an episode of “cool hunting” in which marketers go seek the new adopters of any product or technology (about 20 percent of the population) so the companies can have a handle on what the rest of us might want. In fact, new adopters and their choices are eventually emulated by the other 80 percent of the population. Once that happens -- the product or service is no longer cool and the trendsetters have moved on.
In this SoMe (Social Media) adventure, the geeks with the latest gadgetry finally do win – with the latest access and chance to shape the features of Google+.
But by embracing this technology you can now use Google+ to hide away from the “friends” that you couldn’t politely unfriend on Facebook years ago.
In short, those who were on the ground floor for Facebook (over SEVEN years ago) can now construct Google privacy circles with carefully selected participants. The by-product is that Google+ users can defriend, unfriend and refriend their Facebook relationships while the technology is hot and your FB people aren’t even aware.
Yet despite all of this friending and circling, for me it still comes back to one issue: with more electronic connections, when will we have the opportunity to be humanly connected – by face, by touch, by a word, tear or smile? Personally or professionally, in my opinion there's never enough bytes to replace THAT experience. And I hope that those human connections remain part of the game most of us would prefer to play.
