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Comment by ramanujan | Hacker News Reader

Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.

It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field.

You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends.

But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most.

Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.

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Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.

> I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.

That's exactly what they are: a visual interface to tags and tagged social graph nodes.

Google has always favored many-to-many "tags" over one-to-many "folders". Gmail brought that distinction to the mainstream. Circles are really just tags on the user object, in the end.

I'm not sure just how "mainstream" Gmail is.

I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.

I got curious about this a while ago, so I polled my nontechnical friends (artists, lawyers, that kind of thing). Out of 18 respondents, 100% of them used gmail as their primary personal email client. The lawyers all used Outlook at work, of course; maybe that 5% figure is for corporate clients?

think this has gone way up in recent years with ppl with old hotmail whatever accts fed up of spam,more people on gServices etc....more exposure to gApps via android etc (not to mention being forced into using a gAccount/gMail for android things...)

Gmail integration with a number of universities is also a great way to get a new, large batch of young and fairly intellectual people familiar with Google products every single year.

I have an email list with 304,985 contacts:

34.5% yahoo.com

24.0% other

13.9% aol.com

9.9% gmail.com

2.6% comcast.net

2.2% msn.com

Really... more msn.com than hotmail.com?

Oops, thanks for asking. I left out hotmail.com which was 13%

My mistake.

Clobber's list is similar to BCC's user base. In particular, a lot of ISP email addresses.

"it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle."

That's not how it works. You can put people into as many circles as you like.

It should be possible to extract circles from one's email and messaging behavior, to find friends and cliques. It should be automated as best as possible.

Even simply the most contacted people in the last week - and sharing to those people the most, even though you might have a friend you haven't seen for a long time, and they might be a great friend, that doesn't automatically mean you want to share with them. To assume that people want to share more with better and older friends and less with newer friends is wrong.

Users should get a menu of content automatically provided based on prior contact and clique analysis, and pick the items and people they find interesting to ensure more permanent viewing, which in time can fade over time if that content isn't liked. Even tracking what is clicked can automate this without having to manually like or +1 something - it's like listening to a person speak.

The last thing I want to do is setup a G+ account and start customizing friends lists, circles, clicking like and dislike buttons - it should be automated, and Google should delve into my GTalk and Email to see people I've been in contact. Whose emails am I replying? What people am I having conversations? I don't quite know who all my online friends are - G+ should work that out for me and cement those relationships without my input. Online friend dynamics are too liquid to be manual.

The problem isn't circles, it's the way they are created, edited and devised.

Google has already started down this path in Gmail -- when replying to a message, it suggests that I consider including one of my other contacts, and selects the suggestion fairly accurately.

I'd imagine this will be expanded and soon find its way into Google+.

> Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle.

A person can belong to more than one circle (that's why you have a list of checkboxes, one per circle).

There is no effort involved in putting people in multiple circles. You just drag them into whichever ones you want or click on multiple checkboxes from any of their profile chiclets.

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