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Twitter Circle

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36 pointslayer815 comments

A similar feature exists on several other social media platforms and I think it's great.

This is really helpful when your social media following grows beyond friends and family but isn't large enough to justify creating a completely separate private account. Whenever I post photos of my kids or other things that are only interesting to close friends and family, I can flip the switch to only share with a small group a pre-selected people. The other followers I've picked up along the way don't have to see that content and I can limit distribution. It's win-win.

Perhaps not a coincidence that 150 is Dunbar's Number[1]?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Whether accurate or not, a limit has to be decided.

I suspect it's more of an organizational tool problem than simply having a number to limit distribution, and that this is the lowest hanging fruit to create a solution for - for better or worse depending on your use case or needs; and externalized value no longer created by using this limitation may or may not result in a net benefit for you.

Is there also a limit to the number of Circles one can define? That might help with spam prevention.

Google+ would like a word...

Google+ circles was a good idea. I'm not sure why every competitor adopted it. I guessing with no structure users spend more time on social media, so less money is earned on ads.

There is also a theory that Snapchat is doing well because it's a more "private" experience than publishing to the world.

If we can create twitter circles based on URLs, or via an API, couldn't we use this as a type of Disqus/commenting platform on websites?

Or maybe an embedded twitter circle or something that is private to only those who loaded the embed? I don't know, just brainstorming but I think Twitter could definitely take on/over Disqus with something like this.

My understanding is that Twitter Circles are unidirectional single-sender multiple-recipients. Not sure how that’s compatible with website comments, which at the very least are multiple-sender, which means you need authorization/moderation mechanisms. That seems like a whole different story than Circles.

Google Plus remembers...

This seems like one of those "Good for the user, bad for the network" type features. It's great if you're an established user with a clear friend network that you want to communicate with, but it works to isolate different communities, and challenges the "open-by-default" assumption that arguably defines twitter and the way it works. This kind of asks the question that if everyone moves to this feature then what is twitter and how does it differ from Facebook.

This is a clone of "close friends" on Instagram stories.

There is only one Circle per user.

Not sure why everyone seems to be thinking you can define multiple circles, a la email alisases or Google+

I like it a lot. I've been using Twitter as a private account with a dozen of friends that I follow/follow me for the last few years. This would allow me to have that, but to also be able to make public tweets from time to time, instead of having to have two separate accounts.

My mental model of this is like an email alias you define in your mail client mapping to multiple recipients.

This doesn't seem very inclusive.

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