Apart from the fact that I base myself here! Just kidding. I spent a lot of time on Facebook prior to migrating across to Google+. I do still have a Facebook presence but it is out of a necessity for work I was doing in my community. I rarely ever post anything there specifically for that site apart from links to my blogs etc. The thing that puzzles me a little is the strength and level of communication that Google+ (G+) as opposed to the weak presence on Facebook (FB) that role playing has. I have no intention on this being a FB bashing session either. This issue puzzles me.
Let us start with Fate Core as a comparison. Every morning I get up, shower, have breakfast and then go through my notifications and emails. I am keen to keep up with developments in the Fate Core community so I have alerts turned on and I get a MOUNTAIN of them overnight every day. Some interesting. Some not so interesting but you get that with everything. So I skip across to Fate Core page on Facebook. it has something around the ninety like mark and one, let me reiterate this, one post in 2013 on the 25th of February. I thought I might just be on the wrong page so I searched again. There is only one Fate Core site and I had just looked at it. OK, so I search for Evil Hat Productions and find it. It appears active but looking at it I see that on average it is getting maybe three posts a week and they are all from the company.
I thought this might be because we could not post to their page so I put a post up. I am keen to find out about hacks so I put the following post up;
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| My post to Evil Hat page for Facebook |
And to do a comparison I have put a post up in the G+ Fate Core community.
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| My Google+ comment in Fate Core |
And guess what, I have two people subscribe to my post before I am even finished putting the picture into the blog from G+ and no action from the FB feed. I will continue to keep an eye on this as I go along.
Between that paragraph and this one I now have 6 comments (not including my two) on the Google+ post and still nothing on the FB side. But now we better look into the Pathfinder side of things. You knew I was going to take it there so lets plough on as this offers a different issue between the two sites. About a week ago I decided that I should “Like” the Pathfinder page of FB so I went looking for it. There are like hundreds of pages all with very similar names claiming to be Pathfinder! Which one do I choose? I look to the number of likes and decide the one with the largest must be the official page so I like it but I can’t post to it! i don’t have 17 years to research the other pages so I give up. In comparison I go to G+ and do a search (I am already a member on the community but I have to do the same comparison) and find their are still loads of Pathfinder pages but the difference is I can tell which is the official and how the others are related quite easily! they have clearly defined names that tell me immediately what sort of group I am joining…
Score G+: 7, FB: 0.
So why is this so? What is leading us down this path? Facebook is, without any argument, the largest social networking site in the world. Every report I see on G+ tells me it is slowly dying in this race, but is it a race at all? How can the biggest social networking site in the world fail people who want to play a social game together? To get together and pass comment on games and share ideas that we collectively love. This perplexes me but I do think it lies in the approach to “community” sites that the two sites offer.
I have a friend who teaches astrology +Linda Reid who I see infrequently. I talked to her about communities and G+ once and she was excited to see it come in. However it took some time from that discussion to when it did come in and I think G+ may have lost her. It is a shame as she would seriously benefit from using the communities of G+ as it perfectly suits what she wanted to use it for. And that is sharing information in a community. FB takes a different approach, it sees that you should say what you like so others can view that and interact with you because of it. It does not really promote open group sharing although through it’s Pages function it could do this. It would still be a watered down version of the G+ version as categories of sharing are non existent and invite only may also be an issue.
Score G+: 8 FB: 0
This cannot be all it is though. What are your thoughts on this? Why does G+ have the edge on FB? Is it simply because those of us who are here want to use social networking for communication and sharing of thoughts and ideas rather than the fact that we just did the vacuuming or the kids are out so its wine time? What about G+ seems to engender this in role players? If you are reading this from my link on FB or Twitter and you are a gamer that has not hooked up with G+ yet, I challenge you to give it a try. Go searching in the communities section for your favourite games, or even games that you loved when you were younger. You are sure to find something. Then let me know what your experiences are. Am I just doing FB wrong? Are these pages there and I am just missing them. Let me know!
Final Score G+: 9 FB: 0 at the conclusion of writing this post. Admittedly a small experiment but a telling one. Keep rolling!