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 Google Trends chart says it all. Yahoo!, Google, Twitter – nobody comes close to Facebook.

Kickbacks, shmickbacks: The recent Techcrunch story about Publicis agencies being “highly incented” to work with Google products caused a bit of a ruffle – but honestly, why is this such a big deal? If it’s just a more formalized conveyor-belt version of the same “grease the wheels” vendor-agency and agency-client reality the industry (many industries really) has seen in the last 40 years, then its efficiency should be applauded. Plus I’m sure they wouldn’t be doing it unless it’s actually delivering lower costs and better service to the client, and that those can all be quantified specifically (and will be when some clients inevitably ask for it) down to the penny. The market may take its time, but eventually any company working as an agent of another that does not offer the best service possible at the lowest price will lose out to competitors who do. It will be easier for clients to switch agencies than agencies to switch their providers, it seems. The market may just take time but it is inevitable evolution.

Here’s a head-scratcher.

Meganet, the company that makes the portable system that can intercept phone calls (only to be sold to law enforcement in the US, mind you), has on their homepage code that could take over the page entirely (also known as an ad tag — from Google — they also have YouTube videos on the site).

I guess building hardware for intercepting messages doesn’t mean your website is clean and free of security risks; or maybe everyone trusts Google

Don’t try to add yahoo.com as a website targeting option in Adwords (placement targeting) or the new Google/Doubleclick exchange. If you try to add yahoo.com to a campaign you will see a screenshot similar to this.

Google will allow you to add all other 199 sites in the Quantcast top 200, including Microsoft.com, Bing.com, Facebook.com and others (even google.com). Looks like some engineers were having some fun. It seems silly to single one site out among a large variety of ones, friend and foe alike.

Great piece by Jay Weintraub borders on rant but makes very good points as he lets rip on Google. Alas it is true but there is a lot to criticize.

Anytime I or any individual criticizes Google, it requires a delicate balance, because a single voice against an established system always struggles not to sound like whiny and scorned. When a system becomes ingrained and accepted, dissenting voices get marginalized and those with dissent often relegated to the same category as conspiracy theorists.

As Jay points out, Google still doesn’t get advertising, despite hype to the contrary and billions in revenue. But that as they say, is a story for another day.