Obviously your frame of reference is for a very limited use case. Three examples of social networking working in the last couple weeks (just from my limited perspective):
1. My mom rediscovering someone she hadn't seen in over 20 years through Facebook.
2. Two musicians chatting on each others' music profiles and figuring out how to collaborate on music online.
3. An engineering student from Africa reaching out to me to comment on his project.
Given Garry Tan's work at Posterous, there is some vested interest in the space, but at the same time I don't think his claims are any less valid. I haven't tried Google+ yet, so I don't know if I agree or not.
Especially since this decision is required to be made when you first "follow" someone. It's not like Facebook where there's a small box for you to choose a list after you've already accepted a friend request.
Think about it in terms of number of mouse clicks to model real-life behavior.
To be able to model n people in a system, Circles / Lists require n people making n connections, so n^2 actions. Chances are you won't even get there, so it'll be an incomplete and underused graph.
For Groups, where there's a shared space, it's only n actions. Each person has to be added once.
You make many decisions if you have a high number of friends. And you do so every time you post something. It can get hairy, and it already has for me (at only 60 friends). "Why didn't Jim comment on this yet? I posted it to my Friends circle and it's totally his kind of thing. Oh, he's in Coworkers but I forgot to put him under Friends too."
That's really my biggest problem with Circles in their current form. They're being themed as analogs to how we group people in real life, but in reality we're still network administrators in that we apply permissions to things that we only want certain groups to see. Admins have netgroups (netgroup = users and/or groups) whereas we have no form of inheritance/hierarchy/overlap to make things easy to remember.
That said - I love Circles as an interface/vocabulary paradigm more than lists/groups, and the UI is very well-executed.
It would probably be too much work if "circling" were done after following a person, but since circling is merely part of the process of following someone, it doesn't seem like that much of a burden.
I think that people are actually taking the time to organize their circles. You almost have to be a google+ anarchist to not organize your circles. But are people actually using circles?
The only time that I use circles is when i want to filter my stream, which is useful, though not reason to call google+ a game changer. Now, what will be interesting to see is how i will use circles when i start uploading photos to google+. If i only share with the few people i'm putting in my friends circle, that could be damaging to facebook. That could be a game-changer.
Also, fwiw, I'm using Google+ publicly right now, kind of like a long-form twitter.
I'd say so, as they allow a lot more styles of engagement.
Want to use google+ as twitter? Use circles. Tweet out to the 1,000 people in your "tech enthusiast" circle.
Want to share photos with close friends? Use circles.
Google+ can be lots of things to lots of different people, without spoiling it for everything. But then, I'm an optimist. Maybe it will all be a wash. Who knows?
If you have a 1,000 people in your tech enthusiast circle, you put them there. That is a lot of work compared to people putting themselves there. A lot of the famous people on Google+ with thousands of followers post everything publicly, not even using circles.
Special semantics for the "Following" circle might be nice, where anyone you put into that circle has a "Following You" circle that you are part of. Unfortunately, I think this is probably hard to do in a manner that does not add complexity and confusion to the existing implementation. It would make sense to people from the Twitter world, but breaks the implicit assumption that your circles are private.
Surely the equivalent of the broadcast Twitter is simply to send it to the 'Public' "circle", all your other circles will see that turn up in their streams.
I'm the kind of nerd that still plays pen and paper dnd. I play on a minecraft server. I'm in a lisp usergroup. The groups have nothing in common, and nothing to do with real life. I've found circles handy.
I think the complaint is that you don't actually care whether someone from your lisp usergroup actively wanted to see your minecraft posts. For security its the publisher who wants categorization of others, but for avoiding categorical issues it is really the consumer who wants to be deciding what they want to see.
After thinking about it for a while, i think this subscriber chooses pushes you back into the undershareing problem. Since there's no way for me to tag intentions of posts, there is no way for subscribers to filter out me prattling on about minecraft.
Furthermore, if they have to go through all that effort to set up circles and then filters based on content, why not just unsubscribe?
I understand it feels like you want to see everything from everyone, but then i'm not going to say anything, because my messages must be carefully crafted for a broad audience. The more I can narrow the communication targets, the more information i can cram in a message with jargon, acronyms, and silly examples in groups of three.
Hmm, I guess neither of us have anything besides anecdote, but here's the data for the entirety of my stream so far (includes me and people that are in my circles):
Limited - 63%
Public - 33%
Extended Circles - 4%
Total - 55 posts
So, small sample for sure, and skewed by early adopters who are almost certainly interested in G+ because they have always hated the fire-hose of FB (disclosure: this is why I'm interested in it). I'm also only following about 5 people who could be considered public figures at the moment, and the overwhelming majority of those public posts come from Randall Munroe. So, take it or leave it, but for the time being, and at least for the people I know who are active on the service, I think limiting posts to certain circles or individuals is the preferred sharing method.
As a further (small) data point, I've had a few people share photo albums with me, and none of them have done so publicly. Photos are definitely the major pain point of the oh-my-god-Grandma-can-see-this problem, but so are things like bad language, dirty jokes, non- or anti-religious articles, or politics in general, so seeing those things shared in a limited fashion could also be a game changer. I have already noticed an enormous difference in my own behavior - with Facebook, I dreaded the day my parents joined, and stopped using it basically as soon as they did, but with G+, I have already invited them because there is nothing to fear.
Circles are absolutely valuable, but perhaps they won't be valuable enough to enough people.
I'll certainly use circles if enough of my friends, family, coworkers, etc. start using Google+.
If Facebook had that feature, I'd be using it frequently to post geeky technical stuff to my work friends without boring my non-tech relatives, posting pictures of my kids to my relatives and close friends without boring my work friends, posting politically charged stuff to only those friends I know are on the same side of the political fence, and posting about my side business without my boss and my coworkers being able to read it! :-)
As it stands now though, most of the people I know are on Facebook, relatively few are on Google+ (yet at least), and I just end up occasionally posting fairly bland, watered down stuff that's unlikely to bother anyone, etc.
If Facebook decides its worth changing how things work, I don't think how hard it is to change the code is going to be a factor.
They may even give you two options. The current version (call it Facebook for Dummies) and Facebook Pro (where you need to make a slight effort to manage things).
The problem won't be making the code change, but rather convincing existing users it is worth the time to go retroactively categorize all their "friends".
How many writers throw away the piece they've been working on and start anew?
That fresh start is invigorating, especially for those of us who've been with Facebook since the college only days. In those days it was "Let's see who I can meet on facebook", where today my primary use of facebook is to keep tabs on those I already know. So now I have a huge mix of acquaintances, friends, and family and of my 650 friends I care about maybe 50 of them. I've considered deleting my facebook account and the signing up again, but that would just confuse everyone. Google+ is a great excuse to start new and to file away all those random people from high school into my "People I don't care about" circle. If I need to get a hold of someone from those days, a quick post to that circle asking if anyone can help me get in touch will do wonders. For everything else, they don't exist.
I see what you mean. And I'm eager to see how it works out. If its substantially better and easier and pulls in enough of the people I care about, I'll stop using Facebook too.
You only have a finite amount of decisions you can make in a day. Do you really want to spend them putting labels on people?
Also you should remember that "putting labels on people" is generally considered kind of a bad thing to do. It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world ...
Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
I doubt many people are using G+ circles for the value judgments your post seems to imply. Labeling people as "family", "sorority sisters", or "coworkers" is not such a tough decision and I think few would say its a "bad thing to do".
On the other hand, perhaps there's some use for having a circle of people unlikely to be offended by your dirty jokes or political rants, but even applying those labels doesn't seem too onerous or harmful (there's a safe default for tricky cases).
We constantly make these decisions in the real world. Who do I invite to dinner tonight, whose 4th of July barbecue do I go to, who would be interested in going to see this movie, who wants to geek out over some LOTR Risk while drinking cheap wine (only 4 players!), and on and on and on. Perhaps it's unfortunate that, while we don't have to actually attach any sort of text (which I'll allow you, definitely is a label), on the internet we do. But, as an earlier reply said, these generally aren't the possibly-offensive labels referred to by the common wisdom against labeling people, they merely represent the real disconnect between various groups of people that we like.
Is anyone out there putting people into circles like "Losers", "Smelly Nerds", or "Jerks" rather than "Friends", "Coworkers", or "Family"?
wtf man, this post is full of nonsense and bizarre assumptions. Circles aren't for stereotyping people! No one has groups called "Blacks", "People who are intolerant of other people's cultures" or "the Dutch" (why would a racist follow people he/she hates anyway?).
Circles are for providing context. Every time I go to facebook I see a post from someone I don't remember knowing. I look in my list and see that they are apparently a friend of mine, but from where? In Google+ this problem doesn't exist. When I add them I put them in the context that I know them by (e.g. "Close Friend", "Family", "Photography class", "WoW Friends", etc.). When I know them in multiple contexts I can put them in each one that applies (e.g. "Colleague" and "Friend" means they see everything I say to friends and everything I say to colleagues).
>It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world
You haven't even used the service, have you? It's not something we brag about because no one knows what circles we have! All other users see (if we allow them to) is how many people we follow total. Basically the same info facebook shows.
>Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
To each their own, but I don't even see how this is possible. You're going to put people like Robert Scoble (someone you might presumably follow but not post baby pictures to) in the same circle as your grandmother? I think if you behaved this way in real life you would end up under various restraining orders.
As in: I have a Highschool circle and add my highschool classmates in it. I can then share it to all my classmates so they don't have to do the same work again.
Or: I have a circle containing all great hackers. I then post the link to it here on Hacker News so everybody can have that whole circle with a single click.
There's a difference between "everyone" and "public". Everyone includes every person you've added to a circle - it's equivalent to "friends only" on LiveJournal. Public is that plus anyone who happens to run across your Google+ profile, which is publicly accessible on the Internet.
I find I share to "All your circles" a lot more than I share to "Public", because I like knowing who's reading my stuff.
A "shared circle" wouldn't be a Circle, it would be a Group. While there should be an easy way to convert a circle to a group, the two should remain distinct because they serve different purposes.
The big difference is that my friends join a group, whereas I add my friends to a circle. They don't need to do anything; they don't even know they're in the circle. The purpose is for me to control who I share things with. With circles, I don't have to worry about someone joining the group that I don't want there or hurting feelings by having to reject requests to join.
At the same time, I'd still like to be able to mutually join groups as well, and it's easy to imagine scenarios where I would add a group to a circle (or where they'd be coincident). The two concepts are complimentary.
Yes, sorry i misread you. I assume it's going to be exactly like a group, it would just be embarrassing to call them "groups". maybe "shared circles" or "clubs".
This guy seems to be missing the entire point of Circles. So you can determine what stuff you post goes out to what people. If I post a link that I don't want my mom to see, I won't include the Family circle in it. That's a pretty high return for me.
I'm pretty sure I'd prefer to use a private family group for this. If my mom wants to post something to the group, I will have already created it and she won't have to re-make the circle.
Can you even imagine having your mom make circles?
You're right, the Google drag-and-drop thing works pretty well and is quite innovative. That's certainly a direct way for them to mitigate the circle-creation problem. Arguably that's actually a critical piece of making Google+ work even though Circles is an n^2 operation.
I don't disagree that setup is a bit more work, but I think the pay-off for the individual user is very high. On top of that I expect you'll see Google introducing "Groups" as well very soon... public subscription groups that work better for a "Follow my company" type of thing. Not sure how they will implement that but I do think it is also a needed structure.
Personally though I would take the Circles concept even as it stands now any day over Facebook's method of social management. I've already found myself sharing far more on G+ (despite the fact only a small part of my social graph is there yet) just because I'm not worried that Aunt Mabel will find this offensive, or I'll have to field questions from Uncle Earl about what that tech link meant.
Except that in many programming languages, ^ means xor, so they do very different things. As a result in programming discussions I use n2 instead of n^2 to avoid the possibility of confusion if someone tries to cut and paste formulas into code.
Not really much differently than FB's UI does. Each person is in a small rectangle with the bottom part of the window split to display the circles. The top scrolls and you drag from there to the bottom pane. They will have to come up with a more compact view eventually though for long lists but they aren't too far off FB's lists for space. You can also multi-select (with a window as well) and drag a batch to a circle, as well as use CTRL to copy between circles.
Hmm, when I went to the 'show all' for people I might want to add to my circles it seemed to select from everyone who had an account (there were a lot of squares). Maybe there is a limiting function Facebook that works better.
My UX friends tell me that a selection box with more than 1,000 choices in it is ineffective as a tool for initializing sets.
Interesting, may want to submit that as a bug. When I do a show all I get about 80-100 people but that's probably just a factor of my connections list. They will need to trim that down if it's being overly generous in suggestions.
A meta question is why asking the question of how someone would feel about the utility of the UX when there were many choices offered which would not be appropriate for a particular circle, gets a down vote.
Compared to making or using a Facebook group or even the entire concept of Twitter, nevermind lists, the circles interface is incredibly easy, and even though my mom can barely figure out her Gmail, she could do this in a second.
Besides, it's about managing your outgoing content, not about managing what other people do. G+ doesn't let you post on someone's "wall" like Facebook has. You share content into the streams of whichever groups of people you choose.
Someone has to have the power to add people to the group. If somebody adds my grandmother, then suddenly it's a different group. There are some things my grandmother is out of the loop on, such as who I'm dating. If someone added my extremely conservative and Christian young cousin, that would change the dynamics as well, because I can share things with my parents and my sister that my cousin would find extremely distasteful (maybe not personal information, but movie trailers would be a good example.)
I like being in control so I know who I'm broadcasting information to. It's not the same as privacy, but if someone else in my family shares one of my NSFG posts with my grandmother, it's their failure of discretion and not mine. That matters.
I agree. It's not about creating groups of people to communicate with. It's about classifying how you think about people. The fact that circles are private is very important and keeps people getting mad because they are not in your "bestest buds" circle. When you're sharing something, you should be the one in control of who you're sharing with, not a third party.
This guy seems to be missing the entire point of Circles.
You're right, and so are many of those replying to your comment. The point of Circles is that I want to categorize my social connections, to control what I share with them. It's a unilateral relationship---they don't need to know which circle they're in. It would make perfect sense to have Groups and Circles, and to be able to include a Group in a Circle (but not the other way around).
Circles does seem like it's a bit more introverted than Facebook, and certainly more than Twitter. Designed by people who get the value of sharing different things with different people, and maintaining tight control of who those people are.
Example: you want to share things with your friends from college. There may well have been a "set" that you ran with, but that doesn't mean you actually liked all of them. Circles are a precise, and private, representation of what YOU think the level of intimacy is between you and your connections.
You're the first person I've seen use the word "introvert" in this discussion, and it seems right to me - maybe Google+ is just the social network for introverts. It explains the huge difference between the "who cares about that?" people and the "oh my gosh that sounds perfect!" people that I have spoken to - more extroverted people vs. more introverted people.
I disagree actually; I've only been using Circles for a day, but I'm busy using it mainly to 'Follow' interesting people I don't know and reads their public posts/follow their discussions.
I've only got a few friends in provate circles at the moment.
Search for site:plus.google.com "post by" to see who's out there posting interesting stuff.
Sure, but that's an introverted interaction mode. Introverts might have a public persona, and they certainly might lurk. You're using it more as a Twitter replacement, not as a Facebook replacement, but I'd still argue it's more friendly to the socially cautious.
I think it's wrong for the author to compare the functionality of G+ circles with Facebook's group feature, as the two are not the same. Circles are more directly comparable with Facebook's "lists" feature, which can also be said to have a high amount of work (significantly more than G+'s circles, in my opinion) for a low amount of "return".
Perhaps your next post should argue that Facebook's one-to-one video calling is a better mode of communication than Google+ group text discussion (or vice versa).
You would even have strengthened your argument if you noted how Facebook lists were underused compared to Groups, and extrapolate it to Circles.
Being able to control your connections is a good thing, and eventually becomes very important. But enabling a "don't make me think" approach by default would lower the barrier to entry. 99% of non-geeks hate to consciously categorize stuff in general, and people in particular.
That being said, this could be easily fixed: add a special "all my contacts" circle which contains everyone I've ever added: people can be in the all-my-contacts circle without being into any other normal circles, but as soon as they're in a normal circle they also go into all-my-contacts. Then I can opt into circle categorization when it becomes necessary, rather than before I've decided whether G+ is nerdier and more cumbersome to use than FB.
The problem with buzz was that it put people in your list without asking you first. Here I'm just talking about putting everyone you add in the same bucket, until you (maybe) realize that you want several distinct buckets. That would be Facebook-like, not Buzz-like.
Adding people in a list doesn't count as making people think, because the targeted audience has already been trained to this by Facebook.
I disagree. I think asking people to organize their friends gives a very personal touch, and the interface is so intuitive it's hard to be confused. I think people will actually like how they can have control their friends and will fiddle about with it. It would be interesting for google to release statistics on how much time people spend organizing their circles.
I believe you base your estimation on the kind of people you typically frequent; they are representative of neither the average population, nor the population targeted by social network sites, nor the kind of people advertisers (those putting money in all this, a.k.a "the Customers") value most.
That's fine: my friends aren't representative of anything relevant here, nor are most of HN people's, nor are Googlers'; but I don't think G+ could be considered successful if it ends up catering mostly to overeducated uber-geeks. I think there's still a risk that Google will be known to have created Orkut for Brazilians, and G+ for nerds.
I partially agree with you, though: the feature offered by circle is very useful, very well executed, and very accessible; not having it in FB greatly limits what I post on it, and plenty of people can end up loving it, if it's introduced to them properly (not only geeks). Still, it ought to be easier to start using G+ the way one used FB, and introduce circle control more progressively, as people become conscious of the need. Not for me: for the couple of non-geeks I occasionally socialize with, and whom I want to have in my social network.
Maybe the facebook crowd is not what Google's going after. It seems most of the early adopters are geeks and the twiterrati. Remember that facebook did not grow in geek circles.
I think fine-tuning levels of intimacy and deciding which contexts different people should be included and excluded in is something that everyone does a little bit and some people spend much of their waking lives obsessing over. It will feel natural to invest time and effort into managing their Circles in Google. You can think of it as something to do with your hands while you think about your social relationships, or as a ceremonial way to mark changes in your social graph.
My point was only that figuring out how to organize your graph into circles shouldn't have to be the first thing you've to do before discovering G+. This question (how to organize one's social graph, even roughly) is not trivial at all; if the very first thing G+ demands from you is to figure out a very personal and non-trivial question, it will negatively affect people's perception of the product.
Think of how annoying it is to enter a serial number when installing a new software: it's not a big deal, it's not difficult, and you'll hopefully only do it once. However, that's your software bugging you before your first real contact, and before it earned your respect. Highly irritating for many people. We want our first contact with stuff to start by some instant gratification.
Exactly. I don't want the people I was forced to add out of workplace social norms to know they're in a "Work - Others" group that gets to hardly see anything I do.
These are MY social circles, why should they have to be relevant to anyone other than me.
Circles seems like the Google+ equivalent of labels in Gmail or tags in Reader. You can easily tag a thread or user with one or more descriptive labels. I don't find that a lot of work. Facebook, in comparison (last time I checked), makes you go to the group to add/remove people. Major pain to manage groups in FB.
I understand the criticism and while G+ may be able to benefit from something like public circles, I think the post misses the core concept that circles are my cataloging of the people I know. Nobody else has shares or even understands the weight of edges on my social graph. It looks like google's goal is to give user's ownership over their circles rather than making them a shared resource, it gives the user ultimate control over who sees what they post.
A shared group relies on the assumption that all the members' social connections create the same graph such that that group X is good for their collective Xing purposes. Other than tight-nit cliques that doesn't work well. Even then, once one person wants a "group X minus Y" or another wants "group X plus Z" the utility of the group is severely diminished.
Shared control also has downsides, for example I don't need people who have access to my drunk pictures able to add people to the drunk picture viewer's list. While there are ways of sharing the pictures out-of-band that is a risk and different than the self-censoring that could follow an unwelcome addition to a circle.
There's a simple fix to this, isn't there? Add a user option to define a default group to place new contacts into.
I think a part of the perceived "high work" is treating what G+ would like you to think of as "your friends" as "random people I want to follow" a la Twitter.
this is wrong... for many people, this is fun and worth while in it's own right. Organizing your friends into groups could be a facebook app (so in otherwords, people would do it without any other reason than just to do it and maybe share it)
The author doesn't seem to be taking into account the fact that the "work" involved is front-loaded at the moment, because everyone's joining G+ simultaneously. Once a certain equilibrium is reached, our circles won't change that rapidly over time and the work will (should?) be minimal.
Minor nitpick, but I'm not also not sure I buy the argument that a group that any member can add other members to, automatically and always gets better over time. I don't have any data one way or another, but it seems entirely plausible to me that a group could morph and change with new additions until it becomes something you don't want to be a member of any more.
But basically this comes down to what other people have already noted: Google+ Circles != Facebook Groups
Google circles was based on that real social network paper by Paul Adams. In the real world, there aren't 1000 "friends" to categorise. The oft-quoted figure of 150 friends come to mind. Not really high work to move 150 friends. It matches your mental model so well, that it's hard not to move people into groups
Exactly. You have family and very close friends who might as well be family, but beyond that you typically have groups of friends in some particular context. Friends through work, friends from school, friends through a particular hobby, professional acquintances, etc, etc. Often times it's not appropriate to dump all of these people into one big bucket, to imagine that the level of intimacy you share with a friend you would donate an organ to and some one you like to spend time with at work should be even remotely the same. As social networking sites become mature it's critical that they engage the full spectrum of communication, not merely the lowest common denominator that's suitable or meaningful to all of your extended acquintances.
Forget Circles. It's all about showcasing our narcissism and ego. Where can people see our long friend list? Where can they see our favorite quotations? Our favorite movies? Our huge photo album collection with all our social events and vacations? Where can they see our "Notes"? Where can they see the witty comments we've made on other status messages?
I think the big picture people are missing is that the average facebook and twitter user has put so many hours into their account. Adding friends. Following people. It's been a cumulative process over the last 5 years. Trying to cram that into a week is clearly going to seem overwhelming. What is most impressive is that many (myself included) find Google+ and Circles to be quite friction free.
I don't think he gets what makes Circles good. Their privacy and asymmetry is exactly why I like them. You don't want other people knowing 'how you classify' them, and it doesn't matter to them, really, unless they're being neurotic. Circles is an unobtrusive way to show the people you want precisely the things you want them to see; this would become an awkward tug-of-war if they had to agree on what you did.
EDIT: After a little consideration, being able to designate Circles as public does seem reasonable, though. I follow games industry, comics, and Uni club people and have them in groups saying as much. I'd feel perfectly comfortable publishing those for people who're interested, and would like to find those people.
I'm getting tired of self-righteous posts about how the way Circles works is a problem. It might be a problem for you, but it might be a feature for others. It's exactly what I want, to be honest. If that doesn't work for you, stick to Facebook and Twitter.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] thread1. My mom rediscovering someone she hadn't seen in over 20 years through Facebook. 2. Two musicians chatting on each others' music profiles and figuring out how to collaborate on music online. 3. An engineering student from Africa reaching out to me to comment on his project.
Given Garry Tan's work at Posterous, there is some vested interest in the space, but at the same time I don't think his claims are any less valid. I haven't tried Google+ yet, so I don't know if I agree or not.
Obviously you're doing it wrong.
To be able to model n people in a system, Circles / Lists require n people making n connections, so n^2 actions. Chances are you won't even get there, so it'll be an incomplete and underused graph.
For Groups, where there's a shared space, it's only n actions. Each person has to be added once.
Yes, it would be easier if you could share circles, but it's by no means hard work.
That's why I said the SUM total is MxN
That's really my biggest problem with Circles in their current form. They're being themed as analogs to how we group people in real life, but in reality we're still network administrators in that we apply permissions to things that we only want certain groups to see. Admins have netgroups (netgroup = users and/or groups) whereas we have no form of inheritance/hierarchy/overlap to make things easy to remember.
That said - I love Circles as an interface/vocabulary paradigm more than lists/groups, and the UI is very well-executed.
* People I don't really know
* People I tell about the pimples on my butt or the argument I had with my wife
* Work-related people I talk to on a regular basis
* Hobby-related people I talk to on a regular basis
Most people have 900 in the first category and maybe a few dozen in the others.
That being said, the "reciprocating circle addition" UI is brilliant, I love it.
Who's trashed a personal code base because they couldn't be bothered doing a cleanup, and decided to re-write from scratch?
I think that people are actually taking the time to organize their circles. You almost have to be a google+ anarchist to not organize your circles. But are people actually using circles?
The only time that I use circles is when i want to filter my stream, which is useful, though not reason to call google+ a game changer. Now, what will be interesting to see is how i will use circles when i start uploading photos to google+. If i only share with the few people i'm putting in my friends circle, that could be damaging to facebook. That could be a game-changer.
Also, fwiw, I'm using Google+ publicly right now, kind of like a long-form twitter.
Want to use google+ as twitter? Use circles. Tweet out to the 1,000 people in your "tech enthusiast" circle.
Want to share photos with close friends? Use circles.
Google+ can be lots of things to lots of different people, without spoiling it for everything. But then, I'm an optimist. Maybe it will all be a wash. Who knows?
Furthermore, if they have to go through all that effort to set up circles and then filters based on content, why not just unsubscribe?
I understand it feels like you want to see everything from everyone, but then i'm not going to say anything, because my messages must be carefully crafted for a broad audience. The more I can narrow the communication targets, the more information i can cram in a message with jargon, acronyms, and silly examples in groups of three.
Limited - 63% Public - 33% Extended Circles - 4% Total - 55 posts
So, small sample for sure, and skewed by early adopters who are almost certainly interested in G+ because they have always hated the fire-hose of FB (disclosure: this is why I'm interested in it). I'm also only following about 5 people who could be considered public figures at the moment, and the overwhelming majority of those public posts come from Randall Munroe. So, take it or leave it, but for the time being, and at least for the people I know who are active on the service, I think limiting posts to certain circles or individuals is the preferred sharing method.
As a further (small) data point, I've had a few people share photo albums with me, and none of them have done so publicly. Photos are definitely the major pain point of the oh-my-god-Grandma-can-see-this problem, but so are things like bad language, dirty jokes, non- or anti-religious articles, or politics in general, so seeing those things shared in a limited fashion could also be a game changer. I have already noticed an enormous difference in my own behavior - with Facebook, I dreaded the day my parents joined, and stopped using it basically as soon as they did, but with G+, I have already invited them because there is nothing to fear.
Circles are absolutely valuable, but perhaps they won't be valuable enough to enough people.
If Facebook had that feature, I'd be using it frequently to post geeky technical stuff to my work friends without boring my non-tech relatives, posting pictures of my kids to my relatives and close friends without boring my work friends, posting politically charged stuff to only those friends I know are on the same side of the political fence, and posting about my side business without my boss and my coworkers being able to read it! :-)
As it stands now though, most of the people I know are on Facebook, relatively few are on Google+ (yet at least), and I just end up occasionally posting fairly bland, watered down stuff that's unlikely to bother anyone, etc.
They may even give you two options. The current version (call it Facebook for Dummies) and Facebook Pro (where you need to make a slight effort to manage things).
How many writers throw away the piece they've been working on and start anew?
That fresh start is invigorating, especially for those of us who've been with Facebook since the college only days. In those days it was "Let's see who I can meet on facebook", where today my primary use of facebook is to keep tabs on those I already know. So now I have a huge mix of acquaintances, friends, and family and of my 650 friends I care about maybe 50 of them. I've considered deleting my facebook account and the signing up again, but that would just confuse everyone. Google+ is a great excuse to start new and to file away all those random people from high school into my "People I don't care about" circle. If I need to get a hold of someone from those days, a quick post to that circle asking if anyone can help me get in touch will do wonders. For everything else, they don't exist.
Also you should remember that "putting labels on people" is generally considered kind of a bad thing to do. It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world ...
Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
On the other hand, perhaps there's some use for having a circle of people unlikely to be offended by your dirty jokes or political rants, but even applying those labels doesn't seem too onerous or harmful (there's a safe default for tricky cases).
Is anyone out there putting people into circles like "Losers", "Smelly Nerds", or "Jerks" rather than "Friends", "Coworkers", or "Family"?
Circles are for providing context. Every time I go to facebook I see a post from someone I don't remember knowing. I look in my list and see that they are apparently a friend of mine, but from where? In Google+ this problem doesn't exist. When I add them I put them in the context that I know them by (e.g. "Close Friend", "Family", "Photography class", "WoW Friends", etc.). When I know them in multiple contexts I can put them in each one that applies (e.g. "Colleague" and "Friend" means they see everything I say to friends and everything I say to colleagues).
>It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world
You haven't even used the service, have you? It's not something we brag about because no one knows what circles we have! All other users see (if we allow them to) is how many people we follow total. Basically the same info facebook shows.
>Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
To each their own, but I don't even see how this is possible. You're going to put people like Robert Scoble (someone you might presumably follow but not post baby pictures to) in the same circle as your grandmother? I think if you behaved this way in real life you would end up under various restraining orders.
Or: I have a circle containing all great hackers. I then post the link to it here on Hacker News so everybody can have that whole circle with a single click.
I find I share to "All your circles" a lot more than I share to "Public", because I like knowing who's reading my stuff.
At the same time, I'd still like to be able to mutually join groups as well, and it's easy to imagine scenarios where I would add a group to a circle (or where they'd be coincident). The two concepts are complimentary.
Can you even imagine having your mom make circles?
Personally though I would take the Circles concept even as it stands now any day over Facebook's method of social management. I've already found myself sharing far more on G+ (despite the fact only a small part of my social graph is there yet) just because I'm not worried that Aunt Mabel will find this offensive, or I'll have to field questions from Uncle Earl about what that tech link meant.
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Even if you're making a circle for every person, and putting every person in every circle, it's not n^n, it's just n * n.
But I don't see why you'd make a circle for every person, when you can add arbitrary individuals to Post or Share permissions.My UX friends tell me that a selection box with more than 1,000 choices in it is ineffective as a tool for initializing sets.
A meta question is why asking the question of how someone would feel about the utility of the UX when there were many choices offered which would not be appropriate for a particular circle, gets a down vote.
Is it not a real concern?
Is the answer so obvious I just missed it?
Besides, it's about managing your outgoing content, not about managing what other people do. G+ doesn't let you post on someone's "wall" like Facebook has. You share content into the streams of whichever groups of people you choose.
I like being in control so I know who I'm broadcasting information to. It's not the same as privacy, but if someone else in my family shares one of my NSFG posts with my grandmother, it's their failure of discretion and not mine. That matters.
You're right, and so are many of those replying to your comment. The point of Circles is that I want to categorize my social connections, to control what I share with them. It's a unilateral relationship---they don't need to know which circle they're in. It would make perfect sense to have Groups and Circles, and to be able to include a Group in a Circle (but not the other way around).
Example: you want to share things with your friends from college. There may well have been a "set" that you ran with, but that doesn't mean you actually liked all of them. Circles are a precise, and private, representation of what YOU think the level of intimacy is between you and your connections.
I've only got a few friends in provate circles at the moment.
Search for site:plus.google.com "post by" to see who's out there posting interesting stuff.
You would even have strengthened your argument if you noted how Facebook lists were underused compared to Groups, and extrapolate it to Circles.
They removed it 6+ months ago... presumably because no one took the time to add their friends to lists. It's highly relevant to the article.
That being said, this could be easily fixed: add a special "all my contacts" circle which contains everyone I've ever added: people can be in the all-my-contacts circle without being into any other normal circles, but as soon as they're in a normal circle they also go into all-my-contacts. Then I can opt into circle categorization when it becomes necessary, rather than before I've decided whether G+ is nerdier and more cumbersome to use than FB.
Isn't that Buzz did and everyone found creepy?
Adding people in a list doesn't count as making people think, because the targeted audience has already been trained to this by Facebook.
That's fine: my friends aren't representative of anything relevant here, nor are most of HN people's, nor are Googlers'; but I don't think G+ could be considered successful if it ends up catering mostly to overeducated uber-geeks. I think there's still a risk that Google will be known to have created Orkut for Brazilians, and G+ for nerds.
I partially agree with you, though: the feature offered by circle is very useful, very well executed, and very accessible; not having it in FB greatly limits what I post on it, and plenty of people can end up loving it, if it's introduced to them properly (not only geeks). Still, it ought to be easier to start using G+ the way one used FB, and introduce circle control more progressively, as people become conscious of the need. Not for me: for the couple of non-geeks I occasionally socialize with, and whom I want to have in my social network.
My point was only that figuring out how to organize your graph into circles shouldn't have to be the first thing you've to do before discovering G+. This question (how to organize one's social graph, even roughly) is not trivial at all; if the very first thing G+ demands from you is to figure out a very personal and non-trivial question, it will negatively affect people's perception of the product.
Think of how annoying it is to enter a serial number when installing a new software: it's not a big deal, it's not difficult, and you'll hopefully only do it once. However, that's your software bugging you before your first real contact, and before it earned your respect. Highly irritating for many people. We want our first contact with stuff to start by some instant gratification.
Others can't see my groups? It can't get any better than that, and I really mean it.
But hey, of course I might be wrong.
These are MY social circles, why should they have to be relevant to anyone other than me.
A shared group relies on the assumption that all the members' social connections create the same graph such that that group X is good for their collective Xing purposes. Other than tight-nit cliques that doesn't work well. Even then, once one person wants a "group X minus Y" or another wants "group X plus Z" the utility of the group is severely diminished.
Shared control also has downsides, for example I don't need people who have access to my drunk pictures able to add people to the drunk picture viewer's list. While there are ways of sharing the pictures out-of-band that is a risk and different than the self-censoring that could follow an unwelcome addition to a circle.
I think a part of the perceived "high work" is treating what G+ would like you to think of as "your friends" as "random people I want to follow" a la Twitter.
/not a social media power user.
But basically this comes down to what other people have already noted: Google+ Circles != Facebook Groups
It seems like a form of technical debt otherwise as n of friends approach infinity.
EDIT: After a little consideration, being able to designate Circles as public does seem reasonable, though. I follow games industry, comics, and Uni club people and have them in groups saying as much. I'd feel perfectly comfortable publishing those for people who're interested, and would like to find those people.