The Mystery Surrounding Google Circles

The question about Google Circles, it’s new social media services, isn’t whether or not the program exists, rather whether or not it will be announced this week at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.

Google Circles will offer photo, video and message sharing, with the service sharing content with only the “most appropriate of social contacts in their lives, not with all contacts in bulk”.

Google Circles | Why create another social media service?

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere …have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we’ve always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our “friends” all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_to_launch_major_new_social_network_called_c.php

Google has tried before (and failed before) to enter the social media services genre.  Google Buzz, Google Wave, and Google’s Open Social interoperable widget platform all failed to crack the surface of the social media services industry.  Social networking is an important service for Google to find increased market share in because people spend a large amount of time online with social media and targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Will Google Circles be launched tonight, this week, or in two months?  We don’t know, but we know that the buzz on Google Circles is very positive, and may finally give Google their best chance to increase their market share in social media services with Google Circles.