Why your mom might like Google+

I think you are spot on, and while it seems ridiculous to even me, the "friend" association really bugs me on Facebook. I realize it is just a label on a website, but the implication of adding someone to my Facebook friends list seems to be that I have some relationship with them that I absolutely do not. Thus, coworkers aren't my friends on Facebook, but I have no problems adding them on Google+.

That, combined with the immediate emphasis on limiting who is shared with from the very start makes Google+ a lot less stressful to use. Sure, it is a minor thing, but still pretty important.

It's not completely backwards: both ways are gross generalizations. For one thing, my mom won't join Facebook because "the privacy toggles are confusing," whereas many of my geek friends won't enable 2-step authentication or even https (on both Google and Facebook) because "meh, why bother."

But that's not what "your mom" is about. We use the "your mom" persona when we want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who interacts with technology in a ridiculously different way than we do. Also, it's endearingly masculinist.

So. Your mom might be fooled into oversharing by accident. She also might be too scared to ever share anything, because she doesn't know how to control privacy settings. Both situations are bad for your mom, and Facebook has plenty of both (like I said, my actual mom being an instance of the second).

This way, your mom just taught us that the usability of Facebook in regards to privacy is downright horrible. I have no idea how your mom (or mine for that matter) will react to Google+, and quite frankly, I think this will be a very controversial issue until real moms start toying with it.

I think a "geek" and a "non geek" view privacy differently

a geek is concerned with their privacy in regards to how a company uses their data, they want it stored in a secure way, deleted when they tell them to etc.

a non technical person is concerned with privacy in regards to who else can run across their data, they want to know that content they intend to be private isn't accessible to the general public.

Hear, hear! My mom single-handedly started her own local ISP back in the mid-90s, days of Mosaic. I was the lucky teenager with a T1 in the basement...You know how you have a swimming pool and people would stop by as they were 'in the neighborhood' and their bathing suits are conveniently under their clothes? People would stop by and just happen to have a Jaz disk (remember those?!?) in their purses. Yes, their purses! Ladies like to download giant files through a big pipe, too, and were doing plenty of it in the 90s.

She still runs her own network and servers and is known to curse politely about DNS, among her other 15 jobs in tech (she's a consultant, she works too much).

But I shouldn't have to mention any of this, that a woman excels technically and makes her living with computers is not exceptional, it's not a surprise, and she's not an anomaly (although, my Mom is exceptional, of course!).

Why is it that most of us work closely with women of all ages in a technical capacity every day in the real world, and yet we keep writing stuff like, "So easy your Mom could do it?" It's like we somehow forget how we've spent 3500 hours of our lives.

We could possibly say, instead, "Why your Grandma and Grandpa might like Google+," but that may not apply, either. My Grandma's been on Facebook for ages; she was a big AIM user, too, back in the late '90s, early '00s. But one thing is true - I'll play around with Google+, but I likely won't spend a lot of time on it until my Grandma's on it... :)

I don't consider that sexism at all. It's a common term and everybody know's the meaning of it. It's not implying that women are less technically competent than their male counterparts, it's simply a term that's now used to define simplicity.

It reminds me of the South Park episode that circled around the word "fag". While it originally was a derogatory term used towards homosexuals, thats generally no longer the way it's used. I know myself, and many many others that occasionally drop the "fag" word and don't mean it as a negative connotation towards a homosexual. The same can be said for "so simple your mom could use it". The sex of the subject has very very little to do with the message being portrayed.

I personally think, if anything, people need to start being less sensitive to this type of stuff.