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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

I have the exact opposite experience. I find it horribly frustrating to have all these contacts in different services surfaced to me in weird inconsistent ways.

GTalk are for me a subset of email contacts.

I'm ecstatic that G+ sharing is being integrated with GReader, because I share a lot on GReader, but not everything I share is pertinent to all of my GReader friends.

Ideally, they'll add a "public circles" feature or something like it, that allows people to subscribe to specific subjects that I define and share to specifically, which would be public, but not pushed into everyone's main timelines.

[Edit: To expand a bit, I hope we'll be able to view those public circles in Reader, since that's the ideal interface for it, and not just in Plus.]

[Edit 2: Thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd prefer to consume all Plus content (except maybe photos, I really like the gallery layout) in the Reader UI. I simply find it to be more efficient.

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Here's the problem: when I share something on Reader, I know that it will only be seen on Reader by my other friends who have specifically opted-in to say "I want to see stuff Nathan has shared". It is very reasonable to add a feature allowing me to comment on these shared items, since that's a pretty big value add.

When I share something to Plus, now it shows up to people who are on Plus. They are not in "let's read my RSS feeds" mode, they're in "let's see what my friends are up to" mode. My shared article, instead of being just another item to read and potentially comment on, has intruded on their social activity. If they wanted to read about quantum tunneling, they would have gone to Reader, not to Plus. Plus is where you go to read about your cousin's new haircut.

Sure, I agree. But the problem is, what about the people who are on Reader to read about souffles? They don't want to read about quantum tunneling. But you sometimes post about both.

You're describing a distinction that exists on a service level now, that's basically arbitrary and inconsistent. With everything pushed to Plus and pulled back out of Plus, you can define not only social contexts like 'friends,' 'co-workers,' and 'family,' but also subject matter like 'souffles' and 'quantum tunneling.' This is a good thing.

N.B. I think this will only be truly useful if they add public circles as I describe earlier.

Based on the arguments presented here, I agree that using the contexts that users set up in G+ makes sense. Having said that, I think the part that isn't clear to everyone (well, myself anyway) is whether things will be "pulled back out of Plus". I really hope they will, but...

I wonder about it, too, but this gives me hope:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019052

I don't think Google will copy buzz's aggregate all mode into our + feeds, but then again I'm not sure what they'll do with Reader shares.

I guess I'll share certain articles to specific circles, if I share them from reader at all.

I also kind of want public groups, but the way it works is you have to search for topics.

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