Google Circles is high work and low return
garry.posterous.com
garry.posterous.com
Obviously you're doing it wrong.
To be able to model n people in a system, Circles / Lists require n people making n connections, so n^2 actions. Chances are you won't even get there, so it'll be an incomplete and underused graph.
For Groups, where there's a shared space, it's only n actions. Each person has to be added once.
Yes, it would be easier if you could share circles, but it's by no means hard work.
That's why I said the SUM total is MxN
That's really my biggest problem with Circles in their current form. They're being themed as analogs to how we group people in real life, but in reality we're still network administrators in that we apply permissions to things that we only want certain groups to see. Admins have netgroups (netgroup = users and/or groups) whereas we have no form of inheritance/hierarchy/overlap to make things easy to remember.
That said - I love Circles as an interface/vocabulary paradigm more than lists/groups, and the UI is very well-executed.
* People I don't really know
* People I tell about the pimples on my butt or the argument I had with my wife
* Work-related people I talk to on a regular basis
* Hobby-related people I talk to on a regular basis
Most people have 900 in the first category and maybe a few dozen in the others.
That being said, the "reciprocating circle addition" UI is brilliant, I love it.
Who's trashed a personal code base because they couldn't be bothered doing a cleanup, and decided to re-write from scratch?
I think that people are actually taking the time to organize their circles. You almost have to be a google+ anarchist to not organize your circles. But are people actually using circles?
The only time that I use circles is when i want to filter my stream, which is useful, though not reason to call google+ a game changer. Now, what will be interesting to see is how i will use circles when i start uploading photos to google+. If i only share with the few people i'm putting in my friends circle, that could be damaging to facebook. That could be a game-changer.
Also, fwiw, I'm using Google+ publicly right now, kind of like a long-form twitter.
Want to use google+ as twitter? Use circles. Tweet out to the 1,000 people in your "tech enthusiast" circle.
Want to share photos with close friends? Use circles.
Google+ can be lots of things to lots of different people, without spoiling it for everything. But then, I'm an optimist. Maybe it will all be a wash. Who knows?
Furthermore, if they have to go through all that effort to set up circles and then filters based on content, why not just unsubscribe?
I understand it feels like you want to see everything from everyone, but then i'm not going to say anything, because my messages must be carefully crafted for a broad audience. The more I can narrow the communication targets, the more information i can cram in a message with jargon, acronyms, and silly examples in groups of three.
Limited - 63% Public - 33% Extended Circles - 4% Total - 55 posts
So, small sample for sure, and skewed by early adopters who are almost certainly interested in G+ because they have always hated the fire-hose of FB (disclosure: this is why I'm interested in it). I'm also only following about 5 people who could be considered public figures at the moment, and the overwhelming majority of those public posts come from Randall Munroe. So, take it or leave it, but for the time being, and at least for the people I know who are active on the service, I think limiting posts to certain circles or individuals is the preferred sharing method.
As a further (small) data point, I've had a few people share photo albums with me, and none of them have done so publicly. Photos are definitely the major pain point of the oh-my-god-Grandma-can-see-this problem, but so are things like bad language, dirty jokes, non- or anti-religious articles, or politics in general, so seeing those things shared in a limited fashion could also be a game changer. I have already noticed an enormous difference in my own behavior - with Facebook, I dreaded the day my parents joined, and stopped using it basically as soon as they did, but with G+, I have already invited them because there is nothing to fear.
Circles are absolutely valuable, but perhaps they won't be valuable enough to enough people.
If Facebook had that feature, I'd be using it frequently to post geeky technical stuff to my work friends without boring my non-tech relatives, posting pictures of my kids to my relatives and close friends without boring my work friends, posting politically charged stuff to only those friends I know are on the same side of the political fence, and posting about my side business without my boss and my coworkers being able to read it! :-)
As it stands now though, most of the people I know are on Facebook, relatively few are on Google+ (yet at least), and I just end up occasionally posting fairly bland, watered down stuff that's unlikely to bother anyone, etc.
They may even give you two options. The current version (call it Facebook for Dummies) and Facebook Pro (where you need to make a slight effort to manage things).
How many writers throw away the piece they've been working on and start anew?
That fresh start is invigorating, especially for those of us who've been with Facebook since the college only days. In those days it was "Let's see who I can meet on facebook", where today my primary use of facebook is to keep tabs on those I already know. So now I have a huge mix of acquaintances, friends, and family and of my 650 friends I care about maybe 50 of them. I've considered deleting my facebook account and the signing up again, but that would just confuse everyone. Google+ is a great excuse to start new and to file away all those random people from high school into my "People I don't care about" circle. If I need to get a hold of someone from those days, a quick post to that circle asking if anyone can help me get in touch will do wonders. For everything else, they don't exist.
Also you should remember that "putting labels on people" is generally considered kind of a bad thing to do. It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world ...
Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
On the other hand, perhaps there's some use for having a circle of people unlikely to be offended by your dirty jokes or political rants, but even applying those labels doesn't seem too onerous or harmful (there's a safe default for tricky cases).
Is anyone out there putting people into circles like "Losers", "Smelly Nerds", or "Jerks" rather than "Friends", "Coworkers", or "Family"?
Circles are for providing context. Every time I go to facebook I see a post from someone I don't remember knowing. I look in my list and see that they are apparently a friend of mine, but from where? In Google+ this problem doesn't exist. When I add them I put them in the context that I know them by (e.g. "Close Friend", "Family", "Photography class", "WoW Friends", etc.). When I know them in multiple contexts I can put them in each one that applies (e.g. "Colleague" and "Friend" means they see everything I say to friends and everything I say to colleagues).
>It certainly isn't something we openly brag about in the real world
You haven't even used the service, have you? It's not something we brag about because no one knows what circles we have! All other users see (if we allow them to) is how many people we follow total. Basically the same info facebook shows.
>Personally I only have one circle and everyone goes in.
To each their own, but I don't even see how this is possible. You're going to put people like Robert Scoble (someone you might presumably follow but not post baby pictures to) in the same circle as your grandmother? I think if you behaved this way in real life you would end up under various restraining orders.
That being said, this could be easily fixed: add a special "all my contacts" circle which contains everyone I've ever added: people can be in the all-my-contacts circle without being into any other normal circles, but as soon as they're in a normal circle they also go into all-my-contacts. Then I can opt into circle categorization when it becomes necessary, rather than before I've decided whether G+ is nerdier and more cumbersome to use than FB.
Isn't that Buzz did and everyone found creepy?
Adding people in a list doesn't count as making people think, because the targeted audience has already been trained to this by Facebook.
That's fine: my friends aren't representative of anything relevant here, nor are most of HN people's, nor are Googlers'; but I don't think G+ could be considered successful if it ends up catering mostly to overeducated uber-geeks. I think there's still a risk that Google will be known to have created Orkut for Brazilians, and G+ for nerds.
I partially agree with you, though: the feature offered by circle is very useful, very well executed, and very accessible; not having it in FB greatly limits what I post on it, and plenty of people can end up loving it, if it's introduced to them properly (not only geeks). Still, it ought to be easier to start using G+ the way one used FB, and introduce circle control more progressively, as people become conscious of the need. Not for me: for the couple of non-geeks I occasionally socialize with, and whom I want to have in my social network.
My point was only that figuring out how to organize your graph into circles shouldn't have to be the first thing you've to do before discovering G+. This question (how to organize one's social graph, even roughly) is not trivial at all; if the very first thing G+ demands from you is to figure out a very personal and non-trivial question, it will negatively affect people's perception of the product.
Think of how annoying it is to enter a serial number when installing a new software: it's not a big deal, it's not difficult, and you'll hopefully only do it once. However, that's your software bugging you before your first real contact, and before it earned your respect. Highly irritating for many people. We want our first contact with stuff to start by some instant gratification.
Can you even imagine having your mom make circles?
Personally though I would take the Circles concept even as it stands now any day over Facebook's method of social management. I've already found myself sharing far more on G+ (despite the fact only a small part of my social graph is there yet) just because I'm not worried that Aunt Mabel will find this offensive, or I'll have to field questions from Uncle Earl about what that tech link meant.
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Even if you're making a circle for every person, and putting every person in every circle, it's not n^n, it's just n * n.
75×75 = 5,625
75^75 = 4.26 × 10^140
My UX friends tell me that a selection box with more than 1,000 choices in it is ineffective as a tool for initializing sets.
A meta question is why asking the question of how someone would feel about the utility of the UX when there were many choices offered which would not be appropriate for a particular circle, gets a down vote.
Is it not a real concern?
Is the answer so obvious I just missed it?
Besides, it's about managing your outgoing content, not about managing what other people do. G+ doesn't let you post on someone's "wall" like Facebook has. You share content into the streams of whichever groups of people you choose.
I like being in control so I know who I'm broadcasting information to. It's not the same as privacy, but if someone else in my family shares one of my NSFG posts with my grandmother, it's their failure of discretion and not mine. That matters.
You're right, and so are many of those replying to your comment. The point of Circles is that I want to categorize my social connections, to control what I share with them. It's a unilateral relationship---they don't need to know which circle they're in. It would make perfect sense to have Groups and Circles, and to be able to include a Group in a Circle (but not the other way around).
Example: you want to share things with your friends from college. There may well have been a "set" that you ran with, but that doesn't mean you actually liked all of them. Circles are a precise, and private, representation of what YOU think the level of intimacy is between you and your connections.
I've only got a few friends in provate circles at the moment.
Search for site:plus.google.com "post by" to see who's out there posting interesting stuff.
A shared group relies on the assumption that all the members' social connections create the same graph such that that group X is good for their collective Xing purposes. Other than tight-nit cliques that doesn't work well. Even then, once one person wants a "group X minus Y" or another wants "group X plus Z" the utility of the group is severely diminished.
Shared control also has downsides, for example I don't need people who have access to my drunk pictures able to add people to the drunk picture viewer's list. While there are ways of sharing the pictures out-of-band that is a risk and different than the self-censoring that could follow an unwelcome addition to a circle.
Others can't see my groups? It can't get any better than that, and I really mean it.
But hey, of course I might be wrong.
These are MY social circles, why should they have to be relevant to anyone other than me.
You would even have strengthened your argument if you noted how Facebook lists were underused compared to Groups, and extrapolate it to Circles.
They removed it 6+ months ago... presumably because no one took the time to add their friends to lists. It's highly relevant to the article.
EDIT: After a little consideration, being able to designate Circles as public does seem reasonable, though. I follow games industry, comics, and Uni club people and have them in groups saying as much. I'd feel perfectly comfortable publishing those for people who're interested, and would like to find those people.
1. My mom rediscovering someone she hadn't seen in over 20 years through Facebook. 2. Two musicians chatting on each others' music profiles and figuring out how to collaborate on music online. 3. An engineering student from Africa reaching out to me to comment on his project.
Given Garry Tan's work at Posterous, there is some vested interest in the space, but at the same time I don't think his claims are any less valid. I haven't tried Google+ yet, so I don't know if I agree or not.
But basically this comes down to what other people have already noted: Google+ Circles != Facebook Groups
/not a social media power user.
I think a part of the perceived "high work" is treating what G+ would like you to think of as "your friends" as "random people I want to follow" a la Twitter.
It seems like a form of technical debt otherwise as n of friends approach infinity.
Or: I have a circle containing all great hackers. I then post the link to it here on Hacker News so everybody can have that whole circle with a single click.
I find I share to "All your circles" a lot more than I share to "Public", because I like knowing who's reading my stuff.
At the same time, I'd still like to be able to mutually join groups as well, and it's easy to imagine scenarios where I would add a group to a circle (or where they'd be coincident). The two concepts are complimentary.