D'oh!

[andrewducker]

I've just realised what Google+ does that Facebook doesn't:

Facebook doesn't allow your status updates to be public.

steer was asking how the circles system in G+ was different to Facebook's friends list system. And the difference is that it's more like LJ's friends lists than Facebook's. Which is to say that, like Twitter, you can 'follow' anyone, even if they don't want to be followed. And like LJ you can post to a particular circle, a mixture of different circles, all of your circles (the equivalent of friends-only) or make a post public.

And that means that a G+ identity can be used as a public identity as well as for chatting to your friends. And this is something I've not seen on any other social network since LJ came along.

Now, if it only had threaded comments, I'd be happy!

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

The association with real name is definitely another important issue. Despite preferences of organisations I know people with FB identity secret and LJ open and I know people who have it the other way around.

For those people merging identities would be a disaster.

Even for people like me who prefer open-ness and think security through obscurity ("I post everything to LJ public but not worried that it's a problem because nobody at work knows that wibblewobble is my LJ name.") there can be issues -- I'm currently trying to disentangle google's belief that I'm two people "richard@richardclegg.org" (my public email) and "richardclegg@gmail.com" (a dump where I collect emails for archive which people should never send emails to).

I must admit I don't know the differences between LJ and facebook as regards third party applications.