From Facebook Village to Google+ Galaxy

Image courtesy of the Guardian

I’ve heard and read so many opinions for and against about the Google+ vs Facebook dominance game and who’s killing who, that I wanted to take a look at the whole state of affairs from another perspective.

Where everybody knows your name...

Mystery writer Agatha Christie’s heroine Miss Jane Marple lives in a small village called St Mary Mead. The people of the village know each other well; gossip and sometimes also scandal seem to be part of their everyday lives. The village is a safe place to be, you know what the topics you can safely discuss are, interacting with familiar people on a day-to-day basis. Birthdays, marriages, children, weather and diet are widely discussed.


Sometimes life can be a bit boring, too. Like in a stagnant pond, even fairly insignificant activity may get a lot of attention. Travelling to London every now and then helps brighten up the life and give it the much-wanted flavor that the village life is incapable of providing!

How many roads must a man walk down? 42.

Ford Prefect is a character in the bestselling science fiction comedy series created by Douglas Adams: ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, a five book series in the “increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy”. He is exploring strange and wonderful new places and meeting interesting strangers around the Galaxy in his quest to do research for the electronic guidebook. He’s accompanied by the main character Arthur Dent who is unwillingly launched from one crisis to another while trying to find the place where he belongs and at the same time rediscover himself, too.

At some point Arthur Dent's spaceship crashes on the planet Lamuella, where he settles in happily as the official sandwich-maker for a small village of simple, peaceful people, ready to stay there for the rest of his life.

Based on this, could we liken Google+ to the Galaxy / London and Facebook to planet Lamuella / St Mary Mead village?

Like in literature, there's room for all kinds of tastes: We can enjoy many different types of books and also social media platforms.

Welcome to the Google+ Circleverse!

What are your views on this? Please leave a comment.