While the other Republican presidential nominee candidates for 2012 have a real sameness about them, Ron Paul stands out. Whether that is because, as someone noticed on Quora, his supporters seem to like Star Trek, or for other reasons, social media like/interest data from optim.al (and their new SocialPredict data product) clearly highlights some of the differences. Click on the image to expand:

You’ll notice that Ron Paul supporters like not only Star Trek and William Shatner, but the Colbert Report, Christopher Walken and Guinness. And of course let’s not forget our trusty favorite defender-of-liberty Jack Bauer. However, there are other more real “science-y” things in there that people who like Ron Paul also like – Modern Marvels, the Science Channel, evolution and “the Universe”.

By contrast, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are so close to one another in terms of their audience’s interests and likes that they are almost indistinguishable in the interest graph. Rick Santorum is much closer to them but still a little less same. Zoom in on the chart as it makes for some fascinating reading.

One of the features I find it ridiculous that is being touted as really new & valuable within the new Google+ service, is the notion of “circles” that allow you to categorize your contacts for selective sharing of stuff. Facebook has had this for a long time.

In fact, Facebook didn’t have this, and Ephraim Luft and Mike Greenfield (formerly a colleague of mine at LinkedIn) built a Facebook app called “Circle of Friends” that let you classify your friends into various “circles” and share messages, and chat with them etc. It got a decent amount of traction (over 6 million installs if I recall correctly, back in the ‘good ol days’ of easy Facebook sharing). Whether Facebook copied their idea or just independently thought of it doesn’t really matter (and who knows?) but Facebook later launched the ability for you to classify your friends when you accept an invitation into a number of groups/buckets. As we know, though, most people are lazy and don’t do this things effectively. Plus since it was a later add-on, lots of users probably saw that most of their existing contacts weren’t classified, so why bother with the new ones?

Google decided to give the user control over this instead of an automated process of grouping users (learning their lesson from “Buzz” perhaps). And since it’s an all-new system, it’s more likely people are going to use this feature than if they’d already started using the service without it embedded. But Google on the other hand recently implemented a suggested “other people to include on the email” feature within their Google Apps email product (I don’t really use Gmail much so I have no idea if it actually is running there too) – which feature is a very nice hybrid of automated suggestion and user selection (to choose to add the users to the email.

There are two questions to ask, though, (1) is whether this kind of feature is truly important to adoption of this system, or if it’s really just a bell that seems like a really good idea but won’t stand the test of consumer adoption in the face of the laziness of users and (2) whether Google should have just held fast to creating a more intelligent system for this instead of caving into the “creepy” police. Google is in a sensitive position with respect to customer data, but they certainly won’t gain ground on Facebook in audience-context products (“social”) if they’re not willing to push the boundaries a little further, faster.

This has been an interesting week for messaging and communications – I had business development chats via LinkedIn messages (obvious), Facebook, Twitter (direct messages), Quora and via a chat in a game of Words with Friends. Of course this is in addition to IMs and emails, and of course the ubiquitous SMS messages we all trade in large numbers these days.

There are quite a few socially-connected services with messaging components; and it is sometimes difficult to keep all of it well coordinated. Of course there are services like Threadsy that “pull things together” for you but the configuration/lining up of all these things is going to be time consuming and probably kills adoption on the user level. Oh well.