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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

Circles is very interesting, its could solve a work/life/parents social battle I fight, however the demo only allows you to add a person to one circle, I hope this is just a demo limitation, as my sister is also my 'friend'.

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It is just a demo limitation (I'm using the product right now).

I'm also wondering if your friends will be aware of what group(s) you've put them into. Like, will Fred be able to see that he's in my "Work" group, but be jealous because he can see that Peggy is in both "Work" and "Drinking Buddies"?

No. One of the videos makes this clear.

AFAIK you can put people in several circles.

Do you have a link?

Try it ;)

I'm afraid it might not be... and that's a deal-killer. You can't mess up the most important feature of your social network like this. Now faced with having to choose one particular bucket people will just throw everyone into one big bucket or not use the site at all.

    > I'm afraid it might not be

What leads you to that conclusion? Any article I've seen hints at the opposite.

I'd be shocked if, as you note, they intentionally cripple one of the core components of this site.

I went and looked back at the Techcrunch article and it appears that some of the people in their "bike geeks" circle still appear in the top dragable area of people, so maybe they didn't screw this up after all. It seems really bizarre for them to miss something like this in the demo. It is a demo, after all.

    > It is a demo, after all.

It's a goal driven demo that seemingly exists solely to show off the animations.

I would agree that a more free-form demo would be interesting, and could be less confusing, but it wouldn't fit as well with the rest of the tour page, IMO.

I think we are talking features here, when the only important thing is the product. I doubt people are going to micro manage their circles. It's too much work. "Should I put you into 'best friends' or 'love you guys'. Circles are going to become a very little managed feature. Personally I would create four categories: "Friends" "People I know" "People that are interesting" "Family".

I'd add Coworkers, Drinking Buddies, Biking buddies, Dev buddies, ... this really has potential. I don't want to share holiday photos of my girlfriend in a bikini with developers I've never met but that are in my gmail contacts. Similarly I don't want to share geeky code stuff with people I met through my girlfriend. That example only involves two out of the dozen "circles" in my life.

Hopefully you don't have to wait that much until it becomes automatic based on your iterests ("sparks").

The demo example doesn't allow multiple buckets, but in fairness the demo is presented as a puzzle with one correct answer.

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