Debate: Google+

By Glenn and Jake 

When Google+ burst onto the Internet weeks ago, millions of Americans took notice. Finally a social network for people who couldn’t understand Facebook! However as the dust began to settle a sense of unease set in. What would this new Plus-sized interface bring into our lives? Will it advance our understanding of ourselves or further lead us towards the technological misery described in Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s award-winning essay? Jake and Glenn debate whether Google Plus is worth all the Buzz or if we should Wave goodbye to it and cling desperately to Facebook like ship wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean.

Glenn: Personally I think Google Plus is a waste of time. We have several successful social networking sites already and do not need another. I already spend half of my ten waking hours a day checking Facebook, Twitter, Bing, CelebrityMatchmaker.com, MyRace, MySpace, and Google Wave. When I first “logged on” to Google Plus I was excited because I thought Google Plus would be a way for me to search for kitten pictures even faster on Google. Then I found out it was a place where you can’t post kitten pictures. That made me as angry as Jake was when Casey Anthony was convicted of murder.

Jake: Saying Google Plus is a waste of time is like saying the same of breathing or watching the sun set. Google Plus is like a slicker version of Facebook. Imagine if somebody spilled oil on Facebook, or covered it in banana peels--that is Google Plus. Really, I see it as an extension of mass email. You have “circles,” which group people together, a couple of examples would be “whites” and “blacks.” You can send messages to just one of these “circles,” or a varying degree of numbers based upon how many “circles” you have created. Think about it, Google Plus will better our lives if we allow it to. We can spend all day being facetious about Casey Anthony’s murder trial, and sometimes that is necessary, but let us not deny the power of this important internet tool/social networking site.

Glenn: Your examples of circles to make are deeply offensive. As a society we have to stop grouping people based on their race or preferred parts of an Oreo cookie. Oreo cookies contain more poison than fish from the Sea of Japan and I would never “share” them with anyone on my Facebook friends list. Sure Google+ might be slicker, but I’m old fashioned. I like people clogging up my news feed with dodge ball pictures and quizzes where I can find out which of my friends’ moms will fuck me. I can’t see any of that on Google+. Instead I see a white background subtly embedded with swastikas.

Jake: Google Plus may not completely overtake Facebook, but it may attract the non-45-year-olds and our generation’s equivalents. Facebook has become, as you have described, a bastion for the mentally retarded. The thing that makes Google Plus great, besides a slick interface, is that not every idiot in your high school class is “friend requesting” you and never liking or reading the articles you write for One Year in Texas. On Google Plus, you can make a circle for “People Who ‘Plus 1’ My OYIT Articles” and you can ignore everybody else. You do not have to waste all of your time ignoring everybody and threatening, in vain, to unfriend people.

Glenn: I’m glad you mentioned +1 because it is a complete rip-off of Facebook’s “liking” system, which is arguably the pinnacle of social media engineering. Think about what your life on Facebook was like before you could “like” things. It was empty. It was sad. You stayed at home on a Friday night, reading fan fiction based on the MTV show “Undressed” and cutting yourself. Then all of a sudden you could start “liking” things and your Friday nights turned into the unrated episodes of MTV’s “Undressed.” We should be loyal to Facebook, which was started by autistic hero Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and has literally transformed humanity in a figurative way. I “like” Facebook but will never, and I repeat, NEVER create an account on Google Plus.

Jake:: You have a Google Plus account and have added me on it, birdbrain! The +1 system is similar to what morons do on terrible message boards for things like Naruto and Growing Pains Cosplay. Somebody likes a post or agree with it and they reply by quoting it and adding “+1” to it. If anything, Facebook is a complete ripoff of this system which was invented on a Growing Pains forum. Facebook is fine and Google Plus is not even available to everybody yet and is in a testing phase. It would be great if people would post on it more than they do, but they’re too busy taking quizzes on FB and seeing who answered a question about them. Google Plus could overtake Facebook, but it is going to take time. The first step is for Google to make it available to the public and the second step is for Bub to join it.