Who Deserves to be a Google Plus Suggested User?
Source: David Murphy
Are you Google Plus enough? Google has unveiled a brand-new listing of "must-have" users to place within your various circles, borrowing a line from Twitter's suggested followers list.
More than 100 different users grace the new "Suggested Users" feature on Google Plus, drawing from all walks of life and celebrity status. The various pundits, singers, artists, politicos, innovators, and former porn stars (just one) are split up into eight different categories for easier Google circling �C an additional "Picks" category serves as a best-of-the-best recap for Google's list.
There's no indication from Google as to how a user might best find himself or herself on Google's suggested list. It appears that you have to have at least a minor celebrity within the real world or the Internet in order to be considered for inclusion. As well, you have to post �C hence the omission of the most popular user on Google Plus, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and his Google Plus news feed which currently stands at a whopping zero public posts).
But does everyone on Google's suggested users list really deserve to be there?
"More celebrities, as highlighted in the "Picks" category, will almost certainly help to draw mainstream users and media attention and shift the dynamic more away from the geekier early population of the platform, drawn as it was from Google and the tech blogosphere," wrote O'Reilly Media's Alexander Howard in a Google Plus post of his own.
"That said, such growth might come at the expense of whatever emergent dynamics have existed in these early months. It might be about to get quite noisy in here," he added.
Had we a grand Google Plus editing brush, we'd digitally erase a few users from the Google Plus suggested users list for a variety of reasons. Taylor Swift? She just apparently started using the service in July, and her scant updates are written in the style of a marketing staffer filling Google Plus on her behalf. Playboy playmate April Summers? If humdrum announcements of new naked lady photos are now considered intriguing social content, she deserves a spot on Google's list as much as anybody else. ESPN sportscaster and epic sideline reporter Erin Andrews? She apparently stopped using the service in late July, judging by her posting.
Who would we add instead? Where's geek pundit Chris Pirillo on Google's list? Or geek icon Felicia Day? Or badastronomy.com founder Dr. Philip Plait? Surely near-daily insight about the universe and the world in which we live is of more significant interest than Google Plus suggested user Richard Branson and his three mighty posts thus far: One about his birthday, one about helping Somalia, and one about a video of himself he saw on College Humor.
But we're not the only ones fighting the good fight for proper popularity recognition: Some users on Google's list are trying to remove themselves from the Internet spotlight.
"While I am an elitist I really hate systems that are not meritocracies and because I see people on this list that I believe shouldn't be there, and because there are many people who should be there who aren't that there is no way I can accept being on this list," wrote tech enthusiast Robert Scoble.
What about you? Which celebrities (or D-list celebrities) have you been following on Google Plus? Who's on your suggested user list?
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