Learning From The Google+ Experiment: Operating System, Platform, Apps

As part of the chorus singing about Google+ (see Armano’s insightful The Social Layer: Six Thoughts On Where Google Plus Is Going as just the most recent example), let me make a few observations:

It’s very hard to separate foundational concepts of Google+ from what might considered features or apps. Foundational elements would include identity, following, streams, and sparks. But Circles, Hangouts, and Huddle are best considered apps, in the broadest sense. So apps are a foundational element of the Google+ architecture, and they can closely integrate into the user experience of Google+, like Circles does.

But we are moving toward a world where most of the foundational elements of Google+ will be part of a next generation version of Android, and the things that feel like apps on Google+ will be, in fact, apps running on that future social OS.

This means that I could drop Circles, and use some other app as a mechanism for organizing my sociality. Imagine an imaginary app, called Groupings, that works very differently than Circles, but does build on the foundational elements of identity, following, streams and sparks.

But I would want to follow people not just on the Google+ enhanced version of Android, but the Twitter-enhanced, social versions of iOS and OS X, as well. So long as these two operating systems provide similar social foundations, Groupings could run on my OS X laptop and on my pal’s Android smartphone.

In this model, the operating systems become the platform, and apps like Circles or Groupings could run on either, or on a future, social Windows 9 (once Facebook acquires the phone parts of Microsoft).

I could opt to follow someone, with a globally unique identity provided by the operating system of choice: in my case, let’s say by OS X, and the person I want to follow, David Armano, by Android. We would also be able to use those identities on any device.

Once I opt to follow, the basics are provided: I will get what he drops in his public stream, and it will appear in my ‘upstream’ — the unfiltered collation of all those I follow. What I post or repost falls into my ‘downstream’ which would be directed to everyone who is following me.

Obviously, the various operating systems have to support the fundamental protocols for this social messaging to work, and we will see this in due course, although it’s likely that we will see several contending models that don’t interoperate, and closed worlds built by the various operating systems providers.

We need the social operating system equivalent of http and email protocols to arise, so that an open social web can emerge.

So one thing we can learn from the Google+ experiment is this: I shouldn’t have to login to Google+, and use Circles, to follow David Armano’s writing over there. The works of those I follow should find me no matter what applications or operating systems I use. I don’t have to have Outlook running to read Armano’s email, and I don’t have to browse his website with Chrome, just because those are the tools he uses.

And the developers of these applications, platforms, and operating systems need to be pushing aggressively in that direction, because in the meantime we are dividing the space for social discourse online into a maze of contending, non-interoperable models that don’t harmonize yet.