Google+ & vanity URLs
I opened up a Google+ account last week. I haven’t really used it yet and I can’t really work out how I feel about it. Google have obviously tried to roll up some of the key features that make Facebook and Twitter distinct into one new application.
The main difference between Facebook and Twitter, in terms of the social connections they create between people, is that Facebook’s relationships are all bilateral (if you ignore pages/group likes etc), whereas Twitter’s can be asymmetric. Put simply – Stephen Fry doesn’t have to follow me on Twitter for me to follow him, but we would both have to agree to become friends on Facebook. This is unlikely to happen. It’s been said many times that Twitter’s model is closer to the real world and I do agree with that.
Google+ looks like it is trying to do both of these things. I can put people into my ‘circles’ whether I know them or not. And one of my default circles is called ‘following’. So I saw Ryan Carson and Elliot Jay Stocks on Google+, of whom both I follow on Twitter and neither is likely to be my friend on Facebook, and have added them to my ‘following’ circle. It remains to be seen if this level of relationship, whilst clearly still asymmetric, is in any way different to a Twitter follow.
At the moment there isn’t much interesting content on Google+ but I did pick up a cool hint from a fellow developer regarding profile URLs. For some reason Google is prohibiting vanity URLs at the moment – probably just because the system is in beta although they claim that there are privacy issues to be overcome as well. I don’t worry about such privacy issues, because with the exception of Facebook, which I use very little, all my online ‘personas’ are professional rather than personal and so I don’t mind sharing the links. Hence the following vanity URL for my Google+ account:
For those of you who want to do the same thing it’s a simple 301 redirect in the htaccess file, like so:
redirect 301 /+ [your_google_plus_profile_url]
e.g.
redirect 301 /+ https://plus.google.com/1179564562172364567674
Postscript: Try hitting the url in the above htaccess snippet and you’ll see Google’s charming 404 page.