Google+ 1, Facebook 0 July 19, 2011
Posted by Ben Webster in Uncategorized.trackback
Well, that’s one more thoughtful conversation on mathematical conversation on mathematical topics on Google+ than I have ever seen on Facebook. This bodes well, methinks.
Actually, I thought a one word posting (“Discuss?”) which hijacked an interesting discussion going on at a blog wasn’t much of advertisement for the new social media…
That’s fair. As far as I can tell, there was no overlap in personalities between the two discussions, so one could at least argue that new people are coming into the conversation. I would never have seen the post if Qiaochu hadn’t shared it.
I suppose that one could argue that we should have been forced to go to the page to comment; maybe the world would be better if we had.
I was a little conflicted myself, but I have an incentive to drum up interesting content on Google+ to convince my peers to switch over.
But in any case, discussion would have happened whether or not I prompted it. Going to the blog post is an extra click to make a comment, and if you don’t have a WordPress account you’re not going to go to whatever extra effort is necessary to get WordPress to inform you that someone’s responded to what you said.
It made me think of all the mO questions that say “put it on a blog!” Now I know where to put it.
The comment thread on Cathy’s blog (the source of the original post) is very good, too.
http://mathbabe.org/2011/07/17/math-contests-kind-of-suck/