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Comment by garry | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure I'd prefer to use a private family group for this. If my mom wants to post something to the group, I will have already created it and she won't have to re-make the circle.

Can you even imagine having your mom make circles?

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Someone has to have the power to add people to the group. If somebody adds my grandmother, then suddenly it's a different group. There are some things my grandmother is out of the loop on, such as who I'm dating. If someone added my extremely conservative and Christian young cousin, that would change the dynamics as well, because I can share things with my parents and my sister that my cousin would find extremely distasteful (maybe not personal information, but movie trailers would be a good example.)

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.

I agree. It's not about creating groups of people to communicate with. It's about classifying how you think about people. The fact that circles are private is very important and keeps people getting mad because they are not in your "bestest buds" circle. When you're sharing something, you should be the one in control of who you're sharing with, not a third party.

My Mom has already made circles and found the drag and drop feature to be dead easy. She loves it.

You're right, the Google drag-and-drop thing works pretty well and is quite innovative. That's certainly a direct way for them to mitigate the circle-creation problem. Arguably that's actually a critical piece of making Google+ work even though Circles is an n^2 operation.

I don't disagree that setup is a bit more work, but I think the pay-off for the individual user is very high. On top of that I expect you'll see Google introducing "Groups" as well very soon... public subscription groups that work better for a "Follow my company" type of thing. Not sure how they will implement that but I do think it is also a needed structure.

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.

EDIT: Derp, I'd read "n^2" as "n^n" both in a comment above and here, and even typed "n^2" while thinking it said "n^n". Sorry, garry.

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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

But I don't see why you'd make a circle for every person, when you can add arbitrary individuals to Post or Share permissions.

n^2 is the same as n*n.

Heh, no kidding. I thought I saw one thing while my fingers typed what was actually there. Hate it when that happens.

Except that in many programming languages, ^ means xor, so they do very different things. As a result in programming discussions I use n2 instead of n^2 to avoid the possibility of confusion if someone tries to cut and paste formulas into code.

I wonder how that scales when your web page shows you 150,000,000 possible people to put in your circles.

Not really much differently than FB's UI does. Each person is in a small rectangle with the bottom part of the window split to display the circles. The top scrolls and you drag from there to the bottom pane. They will have to come up with a more compact view eventually though for long lists but they aren't too far off FB's lists for space. You can also multi-select (with a window as well) and drag a batch to a circle, as well as use CTRL to copy between circles.

Hmm, when I went to the 'show all' for people I might want to add to my circles it seemed to select from everyone who had an account (there were a lot of squares). Maybe there is a limiting function Facebook that works better.

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.

Interesting, may want to submit that as a bug. When I do a show all I get about 80-100 people but that's probably just a factor of my connections list. They will need to trim that down if it's being overly generous in suggestions.

Fair enough.

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?

Compared to making or using a Facebook group or even the entire concept of Twitter, nevermind lists, the circles interface is incredibly easy, and even though my mom can barely figure out her Gmail, she could do this in a second.

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.

Making circles is way more intuitive than Facebook groups or Twitter lists, so yes, I could see my parents being able to make a Google+ circle.

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