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I did bother to look; I do care; but I found the tool to be unusable. One accidental share with the wrong people is enough to dissuade me from ever trying again.

It is often asserted that users don't care about the privacy of their communications. I don't know what rock these people are living under, but it seems pretty damn essential to human existence to me. If you've run a different service where people didn't seem to care, it might be because in order to do more private sharing, they simply created a separate account. In this new era of "real name" social networks where it's harder to have multiple accounts, custom privacy settings are even more essential.

And it's simply false that it's too complex for users. Flickr does this, with prefab and nonce user group sharing, and it works pretty well. Well enough that swingers trading naughty pictures can coexist with holiday snaps.

LiveJournal had features like this since 2002 and nearly every frequent user had custom friend groups. Enough for terabytes of teen angst to be shielded from the whole school learning about it.

I think customizing sharing is a matter of getting the UI right; there's no lack of demand for this feature. Google+ takes it one step beyond, and makes it fun to sort people into circles. Furthermore they have a help/tip system that gradually teaches you how to use it. I feel sure that their implementation will be a success, and that people will be making at least as many private/restricted sharing posts as public.

People are not using Facebook List not because the feature is not important. Quite simply, it is because -

1. It takes 3 - 4 steps to get to your list page (depending on where you are on FB) 2. It is buried deep inside Friends page 3. List is not used anywhere on FB except Friends page, making it very useless.

Google + on the other hand -

1. Takes 1 1/2 step to put your friends in a circle. The 1/2 is the drag and drop. 2. It is right smack in front of your face. 3. Notice there is no Friends or Followers page on G+? It is the Circle page. 4. Circle is used more than just for categorizing your friends. You can use it on your stream and it is displayed on the left side of your stream. On Facebook, Groups are displayed on the left of your newsfeed, which is one of the worst mistakes Facebook has done.

Summary - To add your friends to a 'Circle' on Facebook, you can either:

1. Create a list, which takes about 3 - 4 steps and hit a dead end street 2. Create a group, which takes about 5 - 7 steps.

And you wonder why people are going gaga over Circles (1 1/2 steps)

"I had originally assumed that he meant facebook would lack the agility to make the necessary technical changes, so central to their system. But I was wrong--the real point was that they would not be willing to change direction so fundamentally. And given such a large, captivated audience you could hardly blame them."

Facebook has always been about sharing every post with every person. You're right, the only difference is that g+ puts the UI in your face. You're forced to put people in circles, and it's stupidly simple. Facebook hides the feature, and in a community filled with highly technical early adopters, someone needs to write multiple step instructions to explain it.

Care to write up a Google+ version for the same result that is not "Multi-step"? The only reason people weren't doing this on facebook before is because they never cared to.

I'm reminded of Time Machine in Mac OS X. From a technical perspective it's inferior to dedicated backup software, but from a user perspective it's infinitely better because people actually use it.

"The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face,"

Yeah, and the fact that I don't need step-by-step instructions.

so use http://www.circlehack.com/ The point is that facebook has the ability but chose NOT to deploy it. There isn't some barrier to "Changing their core product" that the blog author seems to think.

with code: https://github.com/voloko/facebook-circles

Specifically, the blog author says that they would be able to technically deploy a 'Circles-like' feature very quickly, but that they would choose not to, because it changes the BEHAVIOR of the core product.

You're trying to disagree with the author, but you're both saying the same thing. Oddly enough, that is his point.

Except the feature is already there? and it was there at in 2009, at least. We are not saying the same thing. He was worried Google+ would be trounced by Facebook deploying a clone of circles, except the feature already existed. Facebook has circles but chose to bury the UI. Probably because 99% of people don't care. Like most people here didn't care enough to utilize Lists but somehow think Google Circles is the killer feature facebook doesn't have.

Users take cues on how something should be used. Since lists are not central to how Facebook works, it's reasonable that many people don't use it. It's possible that Facebook made a conscious choice not to make it a central feature. They may want the standard behavior to be that everyone can see everything.

Personally, I think of Facebook as a broadcast-to-everyone-I-know medium, and as a result, I don't say much on it.

I suppose it's an argument of semantics at this point, so I'll let it go, but the one thing I would make amendment to is that Circles IS the UI, mostly. All Circles is is the UI and the integration, and honestly, while the integration is the technical aspect, it's the fact that the UI is what it is, and that it's up front and center that makes it noteworthy.

|The only difference is that google puts the UI in your face, which I like. But saying that Facebook cannot do this is absurd. It's there, you just never cared to look.

I really don't think Facebook even wants you to use this feature. I had set up my lists a long time ago, but never figured out how to actually share specifically to them until reading your comment. Facebook practically hid this feature, but included it in such a way that they could hedge and at least say they at least offer the feature.

Why didn't you care about that feature until now?

I did, it just wasn't something I was going to delete my account over. I was definitely interested when it was announced, so I set my lists up, but how to actually share to those lists is, in my opinion, unintuitive so I never stumbled on how to do it. I don't think it makes Google+ the Facebook killer, but if they can offer a few more ways to differentiate in positive ways I think it's a good start.

I think the problem of Facebook is that people don't know about those features. I personally didn't know about lists until Google+ got released and all this feature comparison started. The problem of Google+ will be to achieve critical mass. I don't care if I am going to use Google+ or Facebook right now as long as my friends are using it. Also, I wish there was a good integration of Google+ with FB, Twitter and LinkedIn (hell, I don't want to publish my status/question/complain etc. on 4 different sites).