Is that really a concern? For now, their friends and family can ignore any posts they don't care about, just like Facebook.
Hopefully, G+ will eventually implement tagging and people can filter out tags they don't like.
Hopefully, G+ will eventually implement tagging and people can filter out tags they don't like.
I have no drive to create separate accounts for each social network. My personal preference would be to have different façades publicly viewable to different groups. I would treat Facebook very differently if I was given the opportunity to separate these groups and target them individually. I have a belief that Facebook tried to accomplish this with groups but fell short on exactly what I've been waning for.
As an aside, there is a Hacker News group for those of you who may not be aware.
And yes, tagging would be nice as well, but I don't think one should have to explain to his/her mother to filter out their #tech and #business posts. That just won't work.
I guess G+ needs a mechanism to allow people to ask to subscribe to a Circle, and the owner can approve or deny it. (Or set an option to auto-allow.)
That keeps the privacy aspect, but also makes it easy for people to follow or be followed.
If that happened, then the circles themselves would become the tags.
Another post here on HN talks about Circles not being Groups. (The Zuckerberg one.)
Reposting my comments from there:
I would definitely like to see Google add groups as pseudo-people... And then you can put that group in a Circle and share to it.
People in the group can see who else is in the group. Groups could be curated (need approval to join) or just open to anyone, and moderated (need approval to post) or not depending on the choices made by the group owner.
Subjot is a microblogging site where you assign subjects to your status updates. Then instead of following people and EVERYTHING they post, you subscribe to people's subjects and only see their status updates in the subjects you have subscribed to.
I'd love everyone's feedback on the product. I think G+ is only solving the problem of selectively publishing and not of selectively subscribing to updates that might be interesting to you.