When I saw that Kevin O’Keefe posted his first impressions of Google+ (or G+, as the cool kids call it) at Real Lawyer Have Blogs, I feared that I would be left behind as an early adopter and my Klout score would diminish, meaning that they would no longer send me stale, but free, snack foods.  The thought was oppressive.

Aside from it being the newest (and hence coolest) thing, Kevin wrote:

Google Plus generates lots of interaction and discussion, more so than possibly Twitter and Facebook. Look at this blog post of mine. Two comments on my blog. 10 comments on Google Plus. You want to be part of a dialogue with influencers and amplifiers, better still if it was your original insight  (blog post) that initiated this dialogue. Not only doesn’t it matter if the dialogue is some place other than your blog comments (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, now Google Plus), but it’s better if the dialogue is someplace other than your blog. More people see the dialogue and have the opportunity to join in. Plus you are seen as someone who ‘comes out’ and joins the discussion, not someone who says, “Look at me and my blog, come here as I measure my success and worth by traffic to my blog and, in turn, my website.”

Then again, one man’s positive is another’s problem.  Being, at this stage, a fairly old school blawger and occasional twitterer, I’m at my limit of internet distractions.  I have a Facebook and LinkedIn account, but I never use them. When I write a blawg post, I hope that anyone having anything to add to the conversation will use the post’s comment section. 

When twitter took hold, people would twit about my posts, meaning that they were both lost to posterity and separated from the post itself.  Someone reading the post might never see the comments, and the conversation was happening in different rooms among different people, never the twain to meet.  I hated it.

Rather than bridge the gap, the internet keeps building new rooms with different people and different conversations.  For those people who want to spend every waking hour moving from room to room in search of something to prevent them from ever having face to face contact with real people again, this is good. 

But consider this unintended point by Ex-Google employee Kirrily “Skud” Robert in reaction to the  Google+ mass deletion of accounts of those it deemed weren’t using “real names” as the deal required:

The former Google employee that originally applauded Google Plus’ statements about real names had their account suspended. Kirrily “Skud” Robert writes in I’ve Been Suspended From Google+ :

So today, I got off a plane this afternoon to find a pile of tweets, emails, and blog comments asking whether it was true that my Google+ account had been suspended. When I managed to get some wifi and check, it turned out that it had been.

The part that caught my eyes was the “pile of tweets, emails and blog comments.”  He didn’t even mention Facebook.  And now we need another place to check as we get off a plane?  Seriously?

There’s a great Toyota commercial about us old folks being anti-social that, aside from being hilarious, makes one heck of a point.

How many twitter followers do you have?  How many people are in your “circle” on Google+?  How many ever get out of the house and hang out in a place that doesn’t have wifi?

Whether Google+ is great, cool, whatever, isn’t the point, and as far as I can tell, won’t be the point.  The point is whether it’s going to replace twitter, or blogs, or Facebook, or whatever will be the new, shiny thing tomorrow, because it’s fine to spend a few minutes on social media, but this isn’t your life.  At least, not your real life.

One of my continuing themes at SJ is that we are producing more lawyers than society can absorb.  And now we’re producing more social media forums than society can absorb, unless we’re prepare to forsake any IRL transactions and spend our days (and likely our nights) sitting in front of a computer screen “authentically engaging” with everyone else who has no life.  Is this really progress?

So how is Google+?  Beats me. I’m on it and the first flurry of circle requests has slowed to a trickle, which either means that the early adopters have blown their wad or that new people on G+ have wised up and decided they don’t need the like of me in a circle.  I can’t say.  I can say, however, that it’s a bit confusing to me, bordering on pointless, and I’ve yet to make any use of the special features it tells me it offers.

Bruce Carton invited me to “huddle” the other day via his mobile phone.  I had no clue how to “huddle” back; even if I did, I had no idea what I was supposed to do in a “huddle.”  I’ve tried to invite people to Google+, but it doesn’t seem to let me.  That may not be a reflection of the program, but me.  Somebody at Google may be saying, “don’t let that Greenfield guy invite people; he’ll increase the age of the room by at least a decade.”  I can appreciate that.

Still, if Kevin is saying this is another great tool for lawyers, and it may be true from the tool perspective, I respond that we are awash in tools, but do lawyers really want to spend their day trolling social media forums in search of something or someone of interest?

I don’t.  If it was up to me, one place would work just find.  Two is a bit of an annoyance, Four is too many, and I’m not going to do it.  Maybe you want to spend your day cruising from one to another in the hope that all your networking on the internet will do something for you that looking in a client’s or friend’s eye won’t, but like the old folks in the Toyota add, I have other things to do.

And if you have something to say about this post (or any other post of mine) and decide to post it on twitter or Google+, why?