less designing products and more designing outcomes

Thanks to Shalini, I started playing with Google+ this weekend. It's definitely interesting. I set up my Circles, checked out some Streams, tried to put in some Sparks (still haven't tried Hangouts - if you're on Plus and want to check it out with me, let me know!). My first thought mirrored the xkcd cartoon, "It's not facebook... but it's just like facebook!"

Rocky Agrawal wrote a great post about Circles yesterday. In particular:

The biggest unsolved problem in social networking remains unsolved with Google+: separating signal from noise. Twitter, it seems, doesn’t even want to try. The timeline is as dumb as it has been since the beginning, a reverse chron firehose of information. Facebook’s feed has improved over the years, but a friend in New Jersey trying to get rid of a bookshelf is just not relevant. 

The lack of quality tools for generating signal out of these feeds is inhibiting the creation of content. People are multidimensional and manual segmentation at the person level isn’t enough. I create content about a lot of things, including social networking, mobile, daily deals, my travel, my reading and more. But as I was reading Onward, I shared less than I would have because I didn’t want to flood people’s streams. If I annoy people, they have a blunt tool to fix it: unsubscribe entirely. So I mitigate my posting.

I'm a very selective content consumer, and an even more selective content creator. I blog, but I won't tweet. I'll post location on Instagram, but not on Facebook. When it comes to organizing my Reader feed or picking people to follow on Buzz or Tumblr, I'm merciless. And as a creator, my biggest concern is not about privacy (although I make it seem like it is). It's about irrelevance.

At the end of the day we don't need more creation and consumption tools. Everyone has their favorites - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Wordpress, Digg, Disqus, Tumblr, Buzz, Flickr, and a thousand others that pop up every day. Right now, all it's doing is giving us more sites to check to get the content that's relevant to us. What's important is how we create value out of these things to generate a stream of content that's meaningful to us. And I'm hoping that as Google+ grows, it addresses the "signal-to-noise" problem that's overwhelming our lives.

The future for content sharing is bright, but the path to get there is still nebulous. Kind of like DTW.

A few months ago I had a great conversation with one of our national sales directors about creating products in healthcare. Healthcare is a great example of a market in which companies have focused on creating and selling products to solve problems. But what's valuable in healthcare is not products - it's outcomes. A subtle nuance, but important. Technology on its own is useless, unless it can drive the outcome - better health, less disease, higher quality of life - that we desire. The tool has to reflect the task.

Google has created a tool to drive its market share in social. It's created a product. But what social needs right now is not products. It's outcomes.

Consumption and creation are huge topics of interest for me. In fact, it was a conversation over seafood in Midtown about how we create and consume that led to this blog. At that time, it was Google Buzz that was new and exciting in social. Now, as I near my 100th post (we're up to 98, for those keeping score) more than a year later, I'm excited to see what Google+ does to the creation and consumption landscape.