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I officially love Google+...Too bad I can't dump Facebook

Love Google+ or hate it (and I really love it), it's about to become yet another electronic destination. The business implications are impressive, but who has the time?
Written by Christopher Dawson, Contributor

I think Robert Scoble may have said it best in his review of Google+:

...it’s clear Google has turned a corner. They have now proven to everyone that they can do social and get on the playing field.

But they haven’t yet proven that they can convince your mom to use it...

He goes on to not only talk about how much he loves Google+, but also how he's more than happy to have it remain the exclusive domain of the technorati (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but you get the point - He, like many of us at ZDNet and the broader sphere of geekdom likes the especially geeky features of Google's new social tool). It actually harkens back to the early days of Gmail when it was invite-only and only the coolest of nerds had accounts. It was different and we were the only ones who "got it."

I'm right there with Robert. Google+ rocks out loud already and it's only a couple of days old. The circle concept, much like Gmail's labels that allow messages to be tagged and flagged in multiple useful ways, fits brilliantly into my idea of what social media should bring to business and education. Already I'm able to clearly separate the various parts of my life (work, family, friends, etc.) such that I can manage communications on many fronts from a single interface better than I ever could in Facebook.

Facebook is just one big social jumble that too many of us end up using for business communications because it's convenient. Google+ only let's work and life meet where I want it to.

Which is all well and good, but I don't have time for the mess that is Facebook, let alone another network to massage and manage. I spend increasing amounts of time on LinkedIn, cultivating business and partnerships, while email remains a key link to many aspects of my life. And Facebook is still, well, Facebook. I've broken the Cityville habit; my kid doesn't even bother playing that for me anymore. But my company has a private Facebook page that we use constantly for exchanging ideas and brainstorming across 3 continents.

My kids aren't going to leave Facebook behind and I'm not about to turn my watchful eye from their Facebook activities so I can better manage my circles on Google+. And, as Scoble points out, if I don't stay connected to Facebook, how will I talk to my mom? My wife would tell me that I could just call her, but come on, what is this? 1993?

So I've found a genuinely useful, remarkably different social network, the Gmail of social, and I'm going to use it because it suits me just as well as Gmail did years ago when I became an immediate convert. But Facebook remains an albatross around my neck. LinkedIn is at least a large crow around my neck, too. I suppose it would be too much to ask for one network to rule them all, right? Management of my entire social graph via Google+ and some slick single sign-on?

Yeah, that's not feeling very likely.

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