It’s been a busy couple of weeks, ones that haven’t included a lot of time to engage with social media, but given it’s one habit I can’t break, I’m still on Facebook and Google+ at least once a day. As the novelty of their latest changes and launches have worn off, I’m stuck on the pain points in each user experience. Both are trying to be the public social network of choice, attempting to balance out private sharing vs public sharing, and the levels of privacy that exist in between. Meanwhile, Twitter is a public beast, but struggles to gain further traction because it doesn’t understand private networks. It still shocks me that the fundamental architecture built to achieve these business goals is fundamentally broken.

Take Facebook Subscribe, for instance. I’ve been blogging about it a lot because I’m pained when I see good product ideas slaughtered by poor implementation. Facebook has the most users of any social network in the world. Why shouldn’t it be a place where we can connect to everyone from our best friends and parents to celebrities and reporters? Because, unfortunately, Facebook offers privacy options only when they seem to hurt the product most. Case in point — you can “opt in” to turning on “subscribers” and you can also “opt out” of allowing them to comment on your posts. Both cases of this offer broken user experiences. Opt in, really, isn’t broken, it’s just annoying for the owner of the Facebook profile. Opt out ruins the entire subscribe experience for the user.

Let’s focus on Opt Out first. When a Facebook user — often a celebrity, Facebook employee, or otherwise notable type — decides to opt-in to the subscribe feature, anyone can subscribe to their posts. Since public figures wouldn’t necessarily want a free for all on their walls (which, in theory, should be the same accounts as their private accounts, Facebook just allows them to hide private posts and posts for friends only), they then block subscribers from commenting on their posts. Why is that “broken social architecture?” Because I’ve seen, numerous times, someone I’m subscribed to ask their subscribers a question in the post, but their subscribers have no way to respond other than to click “Like.” At least on Twitter, anyone can @respond to public figures, and have a glimmer of hope that they might get a response (even if it’s from their PR manager.) Letting people subscribe to your account and not allowing comments is broken social architecture. And Facebook allows this because it knows what happens if they let anyone respond to public posts…

It makes sense for celebrities not to allow public commenting on their wall posts. That’s what pages are for. Why do they need both? The best use case for the subscribe feature is for journalists. In this case, they can post their articles, and questions on topics they are reporting on, and their readers can post comments and share thoughts. That might be the only good use case for Facebook subscribe. Even Facebook employees turn on subscribe and opt-out of letting people comment, more often than not from what I’ve seen.

I turned off commenting from subscribers on my posts for a while, then I decided it was hypocritical to let people subscribe to me without allowing them to actually interact with my content. While I haven’t received the same number of comments that I received after posting on Mark Zuckerberg’s thread from hundreds of men from India and Malaysia who were convinced I must be best friends with Mark Z., I still get one or two random posts on my content, like the occasional “mess up my formatting” post seen to the right.

I have, however, had to block all friend requests from people who aren’t already connected to me through one person because I was receiving hundreds of friend requests per day from subscribers. This hurts my main use of Facebook, since no one who meets me at an event can friend me, and it has stalled my growth of Facebook friends of people I actually would want to be friends with. But this blocking was a necessity — my mom and other friends on my account were also starting to receive requests from these strangers, many who were still convinced I knew Mark Z., and the only way to get their comments to him would be to friend my account and all of my friend’s accounts.

Meanwhile, Google+ is a painful to use because they’re so close in getting social architecture right, but thousands of details break the experience. Again, there are issues with how content is shared publicly vs privately. Google wants to set up a world where you have complete control over the content you share. This, in theory, is also a smart/nice feature. But the problem is that control results in awkward/clunky social experiences when interacting with that content.

Here, to the left, is a post that a social media expert I’ve “circled” (subscribed to / followed) on Google+ has shared. It’s a link to a public article on Mashable. There are a few words (in this case two words) of additional content she has chosen to share, but nothing I could imagine she would be ashamed of posting publicly.

Yet, because she chose to (either on purpose or just by default) share this content with her circles, when I click “share,” Google first warns me to be careful who I share this content with, then promptly gives me the option to only share the content with people I’ve already circled.

So, while the link shared was always public content, there is no option for me to “re-share” this article to all of my followers publicly without going to the actual article page and sharing it from there. That is broken social architecture.

A quick fix would be offering a simple option to “share link” directly, without re-sharing it from the user who posted it, and without re-posting the commentary they added on. I’ve run into this experience many, many times (and I don’t use G+ that often) as one of the best use cases I’ve found for G+ is to discuss news articles and other content, but blocking re-sharing of this content makes the entire experience frustrating.

Meanwhile, if I was following a person — any person, for that matter — I could share the post with them. Google gives me the option to share with anyone in my circles, so it’s not like blocking me from sharing this publicly actually blocks me from sharing the content with anyone. It just makes it frustrating if I want to share the post with everyone. At least on Facebook, I can easily share any post… even those posts by public figures that they won’t let me comment on. I can like them, and I can share them. I just can’t comment on them.

How about Twitter? What Twitter does right (no, not limiting posts to 140 characters) is that it gets public interaction. It makes it easy for people to write back and forth with each other, and ignore each other, generally without hurting anyone’s feelings. The more popular you are, the more it’s understood that you’re not going to write back to all of your followers. But they can write to you, and you can read their posts, and you can decide if you ever want to write back.

Where Twitter goes wrong is in what Facebook and Google get right — privacy. Twitter has terrible private sharing features. I understand that for Twitter it is about public sharing — if suddenly they focused on private tweet circles the whole network would change, and become a lot less interesting. But even in the case of a public network, you need an easy way to reach out to other users privately, in case you want to have a conversation off line.

Twitter has always (or at least since I remember) had Direct Messages but that’s a feature that has also been broken for as long as I can remember. DM’s are supposed to let you write to other people on the site privately, as long as they’re following you. Trouble is… they can’t DM you back unless you’re also following them. I can’t count how many DM’s I’ve received from people that I genuinely wanted to respond to, but I was unable to write back because they weren’t following me. If Twitter wants to make this a requirement for their social architecture, then they should also require that in order to send a DM, you need to be following that person.

This, of course, doesn’t account for the large amount of spam that takes place in Direct Messages. The DM folder is virtually useless, which is why Twitter should just get rid of it unless they are going to make it a useful private communication channel. Otherwise, you just end up with people DM’ing you expecting a response, and you have no way of writing them back, other than a public tweet that they have .05% chance of seeing. And, of course, Twitter is lousy for communication and is more of a one-sided, personal PR machine anyway.

So… which social network will get the private, semi-private, public architecture correct first? I had high hopes for Google+, but inconsistencies like the one I pointed out above leave me underwhelmed. There certainly is room for another social network to step in and get this right. Or, one of the big guys needs to hire a team to sit down and walk through the entire user experience of public/private interactions, and make sure they actually make sense.