Today's post is part of the #MakeTheSwitch campaign. Find out more at maketheswitch.me and submit articles at http://goo.gl/41VZU
From the beginnings of the social Internet, it has been fairly easy to sort the various networks into one of two categories. Some were driven by the social graph, which draws on your real-life relationships for its connections. Facebook is the prime example of this: it uses real names, attempts to reflect our actual identities, and revolves around sharing pictures and thoughts from our every-day life.
The other category is networks that are driven by the interest graph, creating online communities of people from some shared interest. With roots in the first topic-based forums, the interest graph is perhaps best exemplified today by reddit: members join subreddits that they find interesting, and participate in that community under an anonymous, constructed identity.
Each of these has significant problems: the social graph on it's own can be intensely boring if due to a lack of shared interests in many real-life relationships, and the anonymous interest graph discourages new relationships from forming while encouraging a lot of very bad behavior.
+Google+, through various tools like Circles and Communities, has created something totally new: a place where the interest graph and social graph work together. And the result is something special.
Identity and the interest graph make meeting people easy
One of the things that is incredibly striking to me are the number of real people that I have gotten to know through Google+. Through the Google+ Updates Community I got to know +Lee Jarratt, +Clayton Pritchard, and +Daniel Baines, and through a private community we were able to create and launch Google Plus Daily in a month's time. Through public posts that I found interesting and the Archer community I got to know +Jesse Wojdylo, and now I look forward to his posts every day.
These are just a few examples of the many, many people I've met here on G+, and in every case both the interest graph and social graph play a roll. I only met most of the people I interact with on G+ because of a shared interest (often through a Community), but I got to know them and appreciate their other posts because of the social-based identity available here.
Google+ is a much better social graph experience
However, there are many people currently on G+ that see it as exclusively an Interest Graph experience. And they're missing out on the best social graph experience on the web.
Google+ is built for personal relationships. I hangout with my family several times a week, and play Hangouts Against Humanity with friends from high school at least once a month. Events, by their very nature, involve meeting up with people in real life - just look at Party Mode! Circles make perfect sense when you use them to group people by their relationship to you rather than by their interests (which Communities are for), as does sharing to circles. The best indicator of this purpose may be G+ birthdays showing up in Google Now - that’s something that I only care about for people I care about.
What really makes G+ unique, though, is it’s integration with all of +Google's products and services. I experienced this myself a few weeks ago, when searching for “brownie recipe” on Search, Google returned not only millions of brownie recipes, but also the one I was really interested in - my Mom’s brownie recipe, which she had shared with me. It wouldn't have happened if she had shared it with me on Facebook.
These integrations pervade Google products that I use every day, and are only going to get deeper and more useful. In fact, the reason I'm such a huge fan of Google is that that’s what they have been doing for years: when I give them my data, they make it more useful to me.
And that's what makes Google+ the best social experience on the web - it's a combination of the social graph and the interest graph done right. It's a place to meet new people and foster new friendships, as well as a place to connect with old friends in new ways. It's the best combination of interests and identity - and that's a plus.