A change thousands want made to Google+ circles
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
Then there's the subscriber problem where people want to read relevant information on a specific topic. This problem only seems to exist when connections only need to go in one direction, i.e. following. Here users want to be able to view posts on specific subjects by those with "celebrity" type persona's. Twitter solves this (IMO, poorly) with the use of hashtags and multiple accounts. The hashtags don't solve this problem completely because you can't subscribe to a specific user's hashtag. I don't personally care that @pydanny is drunk at a wedding with Audrey, but I'm super interested in his DjangoCon talk. I also don't care about Joe Schmoe learned the power of decorators in his #django views.
To me, tags don't seem like the right approach because of the reasons above. I personally like the concept of "Channels". Users can create any number of channels for whatever they want to post about. When you are adding a user to your circle, you can select which channels you'd like to subscribe to. Then when they post they can select which channel the post is relevant to. Now, some of you may say: Whats the difference between this and tagging? Well, the distinguishing factor is that you need to create channels prior to posting to them. It forces users to categorize their subjects consistently, and it allows subscribers specific choices on what they'd like to see.
person:Markus Persson tag:#minecraft
Of course, this would require the ability to search the stream, which isn't possible yet.
Or let people attach search terms to people in circles.
In particular they both appear together in the autocomplete for who you're going to send your new post to.
(...and, in fact, the way I'm now reading the original poster's concept of "public circles" also seems like it is defined per-poster; but the mechanism on Flickr for "public groups" that mc32 is talking about is quite different: it requires a bunch of shared coordination over what that group means.)
(...and now I've skimmed through a bunch of your history on HN, and found that you talk about "public circles" occasionally, but do not mention "public groups", so I'm just confused. You do, however, compare them to Facebook Groups, which to me have that same global namespace problem. It is useful and important that my public circle might be called "Android Bytecode Manipulation" whereas someone else's might be called "General Instruction Manipulation", as these aren't even hierarchically related; "Sneaky Programming Hi-jinx" from someone else may be relevant and interesting to you as well; once you force things to be maintained in a public namespace it becomes a lot less personal and a lot less social in the particular "sharing is what it means to you" way that Google+ is all about.)
Usability case #2: Guido creates a 'python' soapbox, which is a reference to his blogger account. Starts posting from G+ and automatically updates blogger where all his followers get the tidbits. Twitter is dead. Also posterous and wordpress.
Facebook has this same issue. I want to get updates from my "friends" but I don't want everything they send. Just whatever is relevant to the context I added them for in the first place.
G+ is where the audience is at, so that's where Notch would like to broadcast. Obviously a large number of fans are already following him for the purpose of getting this specific information, not noise on other subjects. If we don't enable that category of user, they're going to depart for greener pastures completely (rather than alienate their fans with a poor experience).
I have only briefly played with Google+, but with some tweaks and some enhancements to the publishing aspect of one's outgoing stream of posts and some way to follow subsets of people's public posts (maybe integrate with Blogger?), I think they could make a serious run at ALL current services that are based on organizing and presenting user-generated content.
That would be a very ambitious project, though. I wonder if Google has the cojones for something that big?
For instance.. barrybe may be in a "Friends" circle and a "Programmers" circle. In a programmer to programmer relationship, I only want to hear relevant topics. As a friend though.. I may want to be subjected to your waves of pictures highlighting your 2nd childs 1st steps. There's no way to keep the kids crap out of my "Programmer" stream.
The same is true for your blog. Unless I can subscribe to particular tags, I can't keep our interaction focused. I may get a rant, a story, an educational post.. it could be anything.
So the next best thing is organize all content by topic (for me). And here we have it.. "Hacker News". Except.. this environment is far less personal and far more intimidating.
>But unless I use one medium for each audience, there will be overlap.
No, that's what hashtags on twitter (surely twitter clients do filtering??) and topics on blogs and groups on Facebook and search wherever is for.
Google+ doesn't support the broadcast/subscribe model that well, and although it helps posters keep stuff private when they want, it ultimately leaves the decision of how much information is too much or too little about some person up to the sharer, when it should be dictated by the recipient.
Social Networks are not supposed to be the same as a broadcast medium. What is being discussed in this thread is how to bridge the gap, but to suggest that information flow "should be dictated by the recipient" instead of permitting fine-grained sharing misses the entire point of Google+'s approach to sharing.
Allowing the recipient to dictate information flow is excellent for self-promotion, marketing, and news broadcast. It doesn't make sense for how people interact with friends, family, drinking buddies, and colleagues.
I want to share my posts with all my friends and have them decide what they want to see. I want to tag my posts or have my friends tag my posts. Then, they can follow my posts with certain tags or hide them from their stream. I want to see what they post in certain circles and join or subscribe. It's like twitter lists, but instead of lists of people, it would have a list of posts.
For instance people want to follow him because they are interested in minecraft, or because they are interested in game progamming. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow John Baez because they are interested in his math/physics blog or because they are interested in Project Azimuth. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow Randal Schwartz because of his Perl stuff, or karaoke. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow Matt Cutts because of interest in SEO or exercise. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
All of the above might be comfortable with some personal stuff being public. But people who want to see their personal stuff has a fairly small overlap with what they have.
In short all of the problems that circles try to solve for private stuff exist for content people are willing to have be public. The simple public/following labels don't address the need.
I want this too, not necessarily as proposed, but at least the use case supported, somehow.
But what will happen if Google will keep adding everything that will turn out useful for someone ? Those people who wanted to use those features will again say that Google+ is geeky.
Twitter has only one way follow, nothing more, facebook has either only one way follow (for pages) or the whole clutter (All you network).
Shut up and stop trying to make the world fit you, try to fit in yourself
There's a way to fix this, but it's not via public circles. There are lots of good ideas out there about how to use tagging, filtering, sparks or combinations of the three to provide a subreddit-esque layer on top of Google+ that would enable more content and options for users while still allowing my Mom to safely post her pictures to her Family circle without worrying about "Public circles".
Google+ currently handles that fact when it comes to private content. It does not handle that fact with public content.
I agree that the whole public/private distinction is important to keep clear. But there are a lot of ways to do this. For instance make public circles blue when you add them, and private ones green. And add a tooltip to make it clear what the colors mean.
In short, I don't buy the idea that "grandma can't understand this" as a reason to deny a feature that a lot of people want. And that matters disproportionately to the top content producers.
Circles are about privacy, I think that this tareted publishing is a categorically different idea and that Google doesn't even need to take the risk of muddling the Circles disinctions.
Besides, I'm convinced a tagging system (cross reference links with other social networking sites, "read" the web pages and combine it with Prediction API, etc) or self-tagging or sharing within Sparks (like subreddits [if you've used them to understand how much they can change the experience of a social networking site], or even better because the conversation is smaller and more intimate)
I feel like shoving it into Circles is brash and missing a good opportunity.
Along those lines, what people are asking for here is pretty much the ability to make Google+ a bit more like Twitter.
From conversations with grandma and her ilk, grandma doesn't get Twitter, either, so I don't think you're losing very much.
Google+ seems to be positioning itself as the Android to Facebook's iPhone, for people that want more control and don't mind jumping through a few more hoops as long as they have it. I think they've still got some complexity to burn, especially if they continue to make the UI as easy to comprehend as it's been thus far.
When I publish a post via my +blog, and it's about my piece of software, I want to publish it to my project followers, but I don't necessarily want to target it at my family. Does that mean I want to hide it from my family? Not necessarily.
The need to solve this problem is palpable, although Google is not clear when or how they will address this problem. http://anyasq.com/79-im-a-technical-lead-on-the-google+-team...
Create a minecraft group with only the manager being able to post there but that anyone can see and you have what he wants.
Create a minecraft group with open/moderated subscribership and you have a typical forum.
Create a minecraft group with private subscription and you have your private channel.
For this groups should be both a persona and a circle. The group persona is who you follow to read, the group circle is who will have access to the information (like in the google groups).
Now it recognises the groups and gets the images from there if you add one, but there's no place in the group to add "accept posts from google+", and no place in google+ to "read from the groups I'm subscribed".
I think at this point since they have all the early adopters already locked in and providing feedback, they should think of suspending any new signups until they have the circle matrix figured out, like Twitter did.
Maybe Google Groups + G+ can have babies and make a superior opt-in, shared-community solution to Facebook pages.
The thing is, from Google's marketing perspective, this is also similar to LinkedIn and .. well .. it would just look way too much like "more of the same" for them to push it hard at launch. But the demand's clearly there, I think we'll see it added.