For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural.
Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"?
At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels...
And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...
I thought g+ circles was a great idea, the reddit webdesign circle taught me I don't care about all of your kids.
Google has ML based version of circle where depending on who is on the photo or whom you have added as recipient it suggests additional recipients.
To me that is a better UX.
a. They don't have to explicitly create circles.
b. If you keep adding someone new or remove someone over a period of time, the model would learn that and act accordingly.
c. If user wants to explicitly create a circle, they can probably do it as a group.
The choice of how to restrict your audience was placed below the 'new post' entry box, and was something you'd usually think about after writing your post. Which was more likely to be a multi-paragraph thing than the short fragments we're so used to tossing off on all the commercial social networks now.
Too bad it failed. I liked g+
I'm not sure why this is harder than choosing an email address to send an email to. Some things I'd share with FAMILY, some things I'd share with EVERYBODY, some things I'd share with MY QUILTING GROUP.
Seems like the easiest thing in the world.
Also seems weird to say that even selecting a group to share to is a massive hurdle, but the fact that facebook buries the same functionality behind 5-6 clicks for each post is convenient. Seems more like it was too easy, and had to be made harder.
The problem is in managing the people in these lists. I haven't found a place where it shows all users I have in a single list. Adding or removing a single user is easy though, as the available lists are available for selection/deselection anywhere you're allowed to change your friend status with that person.
But if you're truly disciplined about this, you never learn that your second cousin is interested in quilting too.
And in many scenarios, there is little reward to being disciplined; unless you're into rather transgressive quilting, you'll probably share your quilting projects with everyone.
The combination of circles and collections is very powerful, though the way G+ implemented it, they do overlap a bit, and don't entirely play well together. Slightly more flexible collections would help a lot.
Heck I wish Facebook forced you to provide at least one tag with each post, just so that we could unfollow e.g baby posts/political posts and then maybe get something useful out of Facebook (my current solution is to unfollow the annoying person, but that is a bit too crude).