Show HN: A few weeks ago, I started prototyping the Circles concept.
circular.io
circular.io
On the other hand, there is nothing in the imagery in the video that actually helps understand what you are doing. All the useful information in the video is in the audio. It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would take to make a transcript and put that on the site, too.
Did it myself, because I despise being forced to watch/listen to A/V without being given a choice to read the transcript.
My (slightly inaccurate, you'll be able to tell where) transcript of the homepage video follows:
Facebook and Twitter are crowded places, your mom/sister/etc are all there. It feels like you're on a big stage talking to an audience.
In real life there are social circles where we're comfortable. Circular uses (a?) new algorithm to build your social circles from your existing data. The conversation is bounded within the circle. Only people inside can participate, so you can be who you really are.
But once you've done that, then every time I post a status update (or tweet, or whatever you end up calling it I'll be forced to consider which circles(s) I want to share with. This significantly raises the cognitive burden of an update.
Unless you've got a really clever solution to this problem. In which case you've got something very interesting indeed and you should definitely keep going.
Or just have different sections/tabs for each of the detected cliques (detecting cliques is a (edit: somewhat) solved problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) ). It'd be the onus of the user to name the cliques, with a suggested default of what others in the clique have named it.
That way if someone you don't want joins your clique, it shouldn't matter - if you're not friends with them.
Cliques should, ideally, correspond to smallish social circles. Such that you can easily monitor and make sure the right people are ending up in the 'right buckets.'
For example, excluding family and co-workers, I have two primary groups of friends. Those in my neighborhood, whom I know based on locality, and those scattered around the city, whom I know (and know each other) through mutual interests. One has nine individuals (with more - about 5-10 who are acquaintances, but not truly friends), and the other has eight individuals (with more - again, about 5-10 who are acquaintances).
Maybe I'm a-social or something. But. There is no overlap between these groups. I've introduced a few in one to a few in the other, but there's no reason for them to gel. They probably aren't friends on Facebook. Using cluster analysis, you could easily partition my groups of friends & acquaintances out.
Can you give an example of what kind of situation might confuse this system? What if it took further demographics into account as vertices with directed edges (whereas friendship, in the graph, is an undirected edge), such as age group, gender, location, employer?
I would assume that status updates only travel one hop on the graph, so that even if someone becomes a part of one of these clusters, if you don't have an explicit connection to them your status updates cannot be seen by them.
You could further weight the edges by how often you communicate with each other via the service.
What would probably happen - and pure conjecture here - is that you would be exposing your status updates to either the boundary of a cluster (you are on the outside of the cluster, with a few connections in), or to most of the cluster (you are in the center of the cluster, with many connections in it). Situation one is more likely with friends (unless they are very isolated friends indeed), while situation two is more likely with family and co workers. Likely, you (and perhaps your spouse) would be the only people in your family network that have direct connections to people in, say, a drinking-buddies network. Unless members of your family are also drinking buddies.
I think the first issue is solved by defaulting to a smaller circle, like Path or like I would expect Google Circles to have. Most of the people I know who use Facebook intend 80-95% of their updates to the same circle of friends, and would only do a full broadcast when asking for information or promoting themselves.
For the second problem of people receiving your more mundane messages as unwanted, tools should provide more advanced relevancy or even manual filters on the receiving end.
I think anything more complex than these solutions is overkill.
No idea if the whole circles concept will succeed though.
Why would I use this Facebook thing when MySpace works fine?
Why would I use Reddit when Digg works fine?
Why would I use OkCupid when Match.com works fine?
Why would I use an iPhone when my Blackberry works fine?Option A: People's icons as little boxes that I can drag around. Make a venn diagram for groups. When you friend people, you select their group(s) by dragging their icon to the right circle/shape. A video/slideshare by google on here a while ago showed how friend groups and cliques were more varied than just one big group. Play off that concept and let people create their own boxes.
Option B: Create a pseudo-tree of connections. Play to people's egos and show them at the center of the tree. Make the neighboring vertices be groups and let friends branch off the group. The pseudo part comes in when people are repeated within groups: either repeat them as vertices on the tree or have more than one edge coming off. I prefer the later, as it would make for a cooler tree.
But really, whatever you make will be better than facebook. Also, probably should never let other people see a person's groups. It could cause severe problems socially.
But that's the internet -- everything old is new again. The old. Then new. Then...
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
Although the circles aren't auto-generated, the user creates them.
The concept itself is trivial and not exactly new. It has been around for ages in a form of private areas on BBS'es (remember those?). It is implementing the concept in a way that compares to Facebook - that's where the challenge is.
Also, realistically speaking, the chances of making people switch away from Facebook are really low, even if Facebook shows an astounding lack of foresight and does not roll out a circles-like paradigm really soon. People are lazy and Facebook ties are sticky. Those who are not on Facebook are not there for privacy reasons, so they aren't likely to flock to your service either.
So it all depends what you want to get out of the project. In any case, if you can and decide to continue, it would be a great learning experience on all fronts - from technical to design to marketing - I can guarantee it :)
I tried working on a similar idea a couple years ago, but dropped it because I couldn't find enough of a draw to make even myself switch over from Facebook to my network, let alone other people. I wish the OP best of luck in executing this idea better than anybody else has managed to yet.
Is part of your plan to allow people to continue to use their existing services/graph, and trying to slowly move them more into your network?
Maybe you could add this to Diaspora. It may be burgeoning, but it's open source and does have users. Also, how does this differ from Diaspora's aspects?
That said, yes! There is definitely a need for it.