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Show HN: a social site designed to manage multiple groups

circleriot.com

9 pointscircleriot25 comments

About a month ago, there was a post here on hacker news about how Google was potentially working on a social networking site based around your circles. Turns out that it was just a rumor and that Google has no intention on working on such a site. I really liked the idea and it was something that i had personally been waiting for. Since Google had abandoned circles (or the idea of it at least) i then entertained the thought of rolling one out for me and my friends. So I started digging around on the subject and found Paul Adam's presentation "The real life social network" http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... and became fully inspired to create CircleRiot. One fun month later of just coding; i rolled out CircleRiot for me and my friends to enjoy. Needless to say they loved it. So now I thought i'd share this with hacker news hoping that you guys will enjoy it as well as we did. So enjoy! Feel free to leave feedback. I'm anxious to hear what you guys think of this.

Btw: this site is invites only. If you'd like to invite your friends, please send them the invite link that is created with your account. Thank you!

I wanted to sign up but my name was rejected as invalid ("Barrère") - most likely because of the accent in it; you may want to fix that :)

I'll look into it :)

I checked it out, and didn't end up signing up because I have no idea what it actually does.

I know you say it allows you to put people into circle, but how does it do that? Does it work with existing social networks, or is it an entirely new one that I would have to get my friends to use in order to take advantage of the circles?

It would probably be more useful at first to integrate with existing social networks because the only my techie friends would signup for a site like this. So in a way it's self organizing.

I agree with earlier comments that some more info before signing up would be good. I finally found the "About" link, that's a start. The same sparse info is given if you click on an invitation link.

I think the idea is promising but there are still many usability issues (or bugs). I managed to create a circle, invited a "friend" and added said friend to the circle. No idea, how said friend is supposed to know of that circle or if it is only implicit, i.e. people would never know why they receive a certain status update from somebody? I could not find out because after I finally found the "Logout" link I had forgotten my password, and there seems to be no password recovery option.

After logging out, direct to Login page, not Signup page?

It seems circleriot offers very little at this point and to use what's there you need way too many clicks. I don't think this is a MVP yet but I know many people who are not comfortable using facebook or twitter because they don't want to share everything with everybody (or even want to be discoverd by random people) so I think your idea has potential. Good luck!

I didn't sign up, but I'll give you feedback.

Your main competitor in my eyes is Facebook. The "circles" you promote seem similar to "friend lists," an underemphasized but existant feature on FB. I can publish content to only certain lists with a few clicks. It's kludgy but doable. I manage only one list on Facebook because that's all the granularity of privacy I need. Most people care less than I do, so I don't see a significant need.

Cool design, but the text on the infographic seems off (perhaps it should be actual text and not part of the image). Your about us page is not terribly long yet still wrought with syntax, grammar, and word usage mistakes.

Site needs to introduce itself with a 30 second elevator pitch. Better yet, a 10 second one.

And as others mentioned, screenshots please.

Sure a screenshot I can do. And update will come shortly :)

Screenshots please.

I'll make and update today to include screenshots on the sign up page.

The graphic on the about page is not correct because parts of groups can overlap as well. For example, some of my surfing buddies can be my closest friends.

Overlapping circles is a feature in the works ;)

I wanted to give some positive feedback since the comments thus far seem negative. The design is fantastic, and I even bookmarked it under examples for my future designs. The logo is incredibly clever and meaningful, something you don't usually see. As a detailed suggestion, I'd keep the font in the text fields consistent with the rest of the site, e.g. use Arial like everywhere else instead of Lucida Grande. I'm guessing you're using the Blueprint CSS framework because it forces the styling of text fields to Lucida despite body font declaration.

Thanks, though some of the comments here are negative, they are still very helpful. Also, the CSS framework did start with blueprint but as the application progresses, so did the CSS and markup.

Design is very sleek. I question though why "add friends" is located on the top nav bar; seems better suited to the side panel.

I signed up. It's looks well. I'm not in any rush to use it though since Facebook offers this exact functionality.

Love the idea, but how is this different than Facebook Lists (Other than the fact that no one uses them)?

Thank you. Creating lists in Facebook only let's you filter news feed but doesn't allow you to post to them. With circles, not only can you filter out to just see friends in that circle but you can also post updates that will only be seen by them.

Not true:

http://min.us/lnx0gs is me posting a status update that can only be seen by a list of people that I've created.

Hmm good catch. :)

Actually, I have tested this myself and have found that changing the privacy settings (like the screenshot you've provided) does not in fact apply towards the list. It's for all wall posts. For circleriot, all that you would need to do is add friends into your circles and that would be the end of it as far as maintaining your circles. Anything that you share within a circle will ONLY be viewed by the users who you choose.

I'm not modifying a list there, I'm modifying the privacy settings of a wall post I'm in the process of making. When making a wall post, there's a little padlock and from selecting the customize option, you can target an update to a list. In this specific case, See Everything is a list I've created. Adding people to that list after this update has already been posted does exactly what you describe, it allows me to maintain just that list and they sell all previous and future things that I limit to it. While I don't use this much for status updates, I use it heavily for restricting photo albums.

It's also not for all wall posts unless you check the box at the bottom of that dialog setting it as the default.

It was difficult to find the logout link. It needs to be more prominent.

The link doesn't work anymore - says "invalid invite id"?

screenshots!!! ,screenshots!! Did i say screenshots!!!!...Because right now i dont know how the F the site works.

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