I was fascinated by the "circles" approach Google took with G+. It felt like a great solution to newsfeed overload and directional sharing.
But then Google+ failed, and we never got to find out whether Circles worked or not
But then Google+ failed, and we never got to find out whether Circles worked or not
I also remember this slide deck from some hip product guy who pitched circles.. 150 slide hot mess.[1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-i...
Instead we really should use NLP to automatically categorize contents.
e.g. I wanna make my 50% for seriously thought-provoking articles, 20% for shitposts, 20% for news and 10% for memes.
In real life, you get "circles" for free! Whoever you are with in the current moment is your circle, and only they have access to what you "share" during that time period.
There is some leaking through the grapevine, but we have an intution for that and usually handle it decently well. It's often even desired.
And the whole reason Facebook et al are popular is that in real life it's really hard to get all the people you want in the right "circles" (i.e. places) at the right times.
You can send a group message, which I suppose can sort of function like a circle, especially if it's long lived. But it would hard to manage many of those.
Every social network now has asymmetric following, but it's all or nothing ... I wish I could follow someone's tech posts, and another person's kid posts, and yet another person's political posts ... etc etc
I was pretty excited when I first found out about Google+, but it was similar in excitement to discovering Facebook and also Fitocrac, yet all of that meant little upon the realisation that I wasn't truly getting value out of any of them.
For a long time, I was in denial about Facebook being bad for me (I thought it was everyone else who was using it wrong) but these days I can no longer justify it in terms of productivity, benefit, etc.
Simply, I need to read more books. No social network is going to help me with that; not even Goodreads (or LibraryThing - anyone remember that?).
So rather than creating and putting people into a “Summer Trip 2018” group, you’d create a “Summmer Trip 2018” topic that you share things to, and your friends would subscribe if interested. If you frequently post about food, you could create a food topic, and people would subscribe if interested.