Google+ has implemented some nice privacy features and also raised some interesting questions about how social media usage grows. From the privacy (or “too much information” perspective) Google+ has gone some way to solve the  ”I’m not friends with Granddad because he posts everything publically” problem. But both the privacy and the limited number of users  makes learning the features a less social experience.

Discovery of features is normally enabled by two routes – word of mouth and by designed affordances (buttons, links) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance that tell us how something works. Word of mouth is as old as human communication. It’s easy to spread a message virally and we’ve been spreading the word using literal word of mouth, phones, email, SMS, blogging, Facebook and Twitter over the years. Our messages have been shared more widely and publicly over time and Google+’s privacy features actually slow the spread of information about Google+ within Google+. It turns out that I can send emails to friends who don’t have Google+ and they get invites, but this doesn’t help me understand Google+ better. Instead I expected to have features explained by people already on Google+. But in these early stages hardly any friends are on there and fewer are posting publicly because privacy features are part of the intrinsic value.

Why is privacy so intrinsic to Google+ ? Google+ has got an unaccustomed but very human social sensitivity because posting, friendship and following are asymmetric. People who add me to their friend “circles” aren’t my friends by default, people I follow don’t have to follow me.  I can share my picnic photos, foibles and joys with friends (as I might on Facebook, if I felt my privacy would be better respected). I can follow people who attend interesting events without them being my friends (as I would on Twitter). It also helps that information isn’t public by default, instead the settings nudge people towards keeping information private – it took me a while to discover how to post publicly.

This asymmetry and privacy raises an interesting point about discoverability – how does word of mouth work to spread the merits and features of a social-but-private tool? How do we find out how other people are using circles, segmenting close friends from acquaintances and managing semi-private information? I want to ask a question (or perhaps suggest a feature) and I’m not sure how best to get an answer. My question is  ”what is the best way to attach a photo from my Gmail to a post I want to share via Google+ circles?”.

Moving from Facebook to a more private communication tool gave me a moment of pause – how do I ask a question about Google+ from my friends? I could Tweet, change my Gmail status, put it on Facebook or actually share it through Google+. In this relatively sparsely populated ecosystem of Google+ we have a classic bootstrapping problem – there aren’t enough experts or advocates. The best audience for my question is probably the early uptake types – those who get the first invites to Google+ . But maybe the early uptake types are those who don’t care about privacy? Or maybe they are the people who’s interest is piqued by the opportunities for commerce. Maybe the early uptake people are so busy publicly Tweeting and Facebooking their public messages that they are too busy to move to Google+.

Perhaps the irony is that if I want to get help with Google+ features should I share my question publicly on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/search/googleplus? Or do I have to wait till Google opens up the nice quiet ecosystem, the noise starts (and the parasites join too)?

For what it’s worth, there are things about Buzz I’d like to change. Conversations shouldn’t be treated so much like emails, for example, with “read” and “unread” states – this brings “inbox anxiety” into the equation, something Twitter was wise to discard. And users could benefit from more fine-grained control over privacy settings.

Inbox anxiety with Google Buzz - I'm not looking forward to having hundreds of unread "Buzzes"

But I’m happy to put these thoughts to one side: at the moment I’m more interested in the response it’s provoked among my own contacts, many of whom are tech-savvy but not really social web junkies. So far, it’s making me think that Buzz has an appeal for people who are active online but always disliked Twitter and had never heard of Friendfeed.

Buzz has definitely been a conversation-starter in a way that Wave wasn’t. In the first few hours, many posts were as you’d expect – “what is this for?”, “can anyone see this post?”, that sort of thing. Today is day two for Buzz, however, and the conversations have started to move away from these meta topics. In fact they’re slowly starting to resemble the sorts of conversations these people have in real life.

This is very different from Wave, which prompted a few discussions of the “what’s this all about?” variety before being largely abandoned even by early adopter types like myself. Obviously this might happen with Buzz as well – as I said above, today is only day two – but the acceptance trajectory so far seems very different. For example, the risk of being flooded with too much Buzz data seems much greater than that of Buzz falling into disuse.

In many ways I’m tempted to think that Wave has been a kind of public beta for Buzz. MG Seigler at TechCrunch is thinking along similar lines in this post, If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present. Buzz certainly explains why Wave had no Gmail integration, something I wondered about at the time.

Once again, it’s early days with Buzz. But my own anecdotal experiences so far make me suspect that – despite the contrary opinions of various mavens and competitors – it’s going to be a fixture in the social media landscape for some time to come.