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They're completely different concepts though. One is "I don't want these people to be able to see this". The other is "I want to publish this at people who are interested".

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.

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Public circles are different than private circles, but I don't find the difference disconcerting. Both are "I am publishing" but in private circles (text, email, conversation) "I indicate who is my audience" and public circles (twitter, blog, presentation) "The audience is self-selecting". Allowing the audience to merely filter by author is not sufficient.

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...

But wait. With your blog now, either your family gets an update (maybe via an RSS feed) or they check it periodically. The same would be true of a public circle. Either they join the public circle an get an update when you post or they can check the content of the public circle whenever they want (assuming you don't need to join the circle to see its content).

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