Proust: A social network for self-reflection

Proust prompts you to dig deeper and bare your soul, in turn learning more about your closest family and friends. A refreshing take on social networking, or too pretentious for the Facebook generation?

For a certain generation, Facebook functions as a sort of digitally pieced-together autobiography.  Of course by its nature, such a compilation is anything but thorough and segments of our lives deemed unimportant or uninteresting (read: Anything before college) largely gets left out. And given the nature of Facebook friends, there’s little room for personal posts of any sort – unless you want to be that guy.

A new social networking site wants to fill that hole. Proust, a product from Barry Diller’s IAC, launches today. According to the site, Proust is “a place for families and close friends to share the stuff that really matters. It’s a place to capture our life stories, thoughts, and aspirations and spark meaningful conversations about who we are.”

At its core, Proust is a philosopher-meets-ancestry enthusiast’s take on social networking, and takes its name from Marcel Proust and his Proust Questionnaire. It directly challenges what comes naturally to Facebook users: Posting only the most surface statements and updates about ourselves. There’s no questioning or exploring yourself with the typical social networking site, and given its purpose, that’s okay. But Proust thinks there is a place for that, saying that instead of combing through the mindless self-centered posts that flood Facebook and the like, you should actually get to “know the ones you love” using this site. It also gives social networking fans a chance to do what they love most: Talk about themselves. No one’s above this, but Proust is at least directly giving users the opportunity to share personal details and customize the format as they see fit.

You can access Proust by creating your own account or using Facebook Connect, everything you do on the site can be shared via Twitter or Facebook as well. You have the option of making your story public or private. If you choose private, it will only be shared with those you invite. Then you are asked a series of questions, including “Who was your first kiss?” and “Do you have any nicknames? How did you get them?”. Along with your answers, you can tag people or list locations, upload pictures and video, or even date the event. If you prefer, forgo the questions altogether and pen your own stories. All this information is aggregated into your personal storybook, which you can view by location, date, people, or media content.

What’s interesting about Proust is that it claims to be a way to know the people you love better – but don’t you already know how many siblings your closest contacts have? Or who their first love was? If you’re close enough to your inner circle that you do, Proust is merely a fun, digital way to sift through that information. But if you don’t, it could actually be a very personal, insightful experience for you. As the Internet identity narrative becomes increasingly vapid, it’s refreshing to find an option for self-reflection and discovery, and to share that.

At the same time, the information you document on Proust is extremely personal (i.e., “Who was the first person who broke you heart?” Really? Does that seem like a trap to anyone else?). If the thought of that data leaking outside of your best friends and family sounds horrifying, you’ll probably end up skipping quite a few questions and rendering the experience rather pointless. Sometimes, things are better left either unsaid or said – but not saved on the Internet. Proust’s team assures users that privacy is its focus, but there’s always a risk you run when you give up your information. And this it’s not credit card numbers or addresses – it’s deeply personal, potentially embarrassing or incriminating items.

Is it a Facebook killer? Not a chance. A Google+ killer? Absolutely not. But it is possibly the most honest way to share and learn with those you know and trust.

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Google+: The right service at the right time

Many of the arguments against social networking that apply to Facebook don’t carry over to Google+. It looks like Google has another home run on its hands

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I don’t turn into a fanboy very often, but for Google+ I’ll make an exception.

There are plenty of bugs, frustrations, and annoyances, but if Google opens up the plumbing and lets developers work with a sufficiently advanced API — at this point, all indications point in that direction — Google+ has the potential to turn ubiquitous. Google has a long history of creating and cooperating with Web standards efforts — its OpenSocial API is a good example — so hopes are high. Developers can sign up to get notifications about emerging details.

Edd Dumbill, posting on the O’Reilly Radar blog, calls Google+ the start of a commodity social layer, and he’s hit the nail on the head: “Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a Web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph. All it will take on Google’s part is a step of openness to bring about such a commoditization of the social layer.”

The infrastructure’s moving in and the response has been phenomenal. Yesterday, in my article that explained how Google’s sweetening the pot for prospective Google Apps subscribers, I wrote that the number of people signed up for Google+ might have hit 20 million. Late last night, Google+ afficionado Paul Allen (no, not the Microsoft Paul Allen) reported that, by his reckoning, Google+ stood at 18 million users.

Paul uses a strange technique for estimating the total number of registered users, which relies on counting the number of American Google+ users with specific last names, then extrapolating for the total worldwide. Vincenzo Lombino, using a completely different estimation technique that includes such imponderables as the number of Mark Zuckerberg followers on Google+, came up with 20 million this morning.

That compares to Google’s announcement that “more than 10 million” people had signed up as of last Tuesday. Yes, the number of registered Google+ users has just about doubled in the past eight days.

The 2-million-new-users-per-day pace has fallen back a little bit. As Allen puts it, “the last four days have averaged only 948,000 new users, and yesterday the site added only 763,000. Yesterday’s growth of 4.47 percent was the slowest viral growth since Google opened up invites back on July 6.” Hold your breath for a second. He’s saying that 4.47 percent growth in one day is the slowest day-to-day increase ever.

If your company has a social networking strategy for customers, there’s a new player in town and it would behoove you to come up to speed quickly. If you use social networking internally, with a locked-down product like Lync Server, you’re going to hear a lot of grumbling from the troops about the freedom afforded by Google+. And if your company is still trying to put a cap on Facebook, the toothpaste is about to squeeze out of the tube — in a different direction.

Many of the old anti-social-networking arguments that apply to Facebook don’t carry over to Google+. There’s far greater control over who can see what and when. Couple that with fewer security concerns — or at least security concerns that crop up in quite different scenarios — and your users are going to have a lot of credible arguments for going social with a corporate blessing.

Google+ has been out for two weeks, and it’s starting to look like Google hit one out of the park.

This story, “Google+: The right service at the right time,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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