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Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a ci

Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. Currently on Facebook the news feed is automatically generated, and the only control you have over it is to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular friends. Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. I wish social networks would trust me to decide what I want to see rather than just let an AI attempt to understand it, which in the end just ended up spamming my feed with clickbait and baby pictures from people I barely know.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
I was just about to post that Facebook has Friend List feeds, but it appears they're sunsetting that feature as of August 8th. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-friend-list-feeds-today/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...
- Sharlin 8y ago
  FB has been slowly making friend lists even less accessible than before, so no wonder nobody's using them. Currently just making a status update visible only to a given list requires a ridiculous exertion: Open privacy dropdown -> select "More" -> select "See all" (the fuck?) -> click "Custom" -> TYPE a prefix of the friend list name in the combobox -> select the list you want from the dropdown.
- coltonv 8y ago
  I had no idea this feature even existed. It was well hidden.
deleted 8y ago
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cronz 8y ago
The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rikkus 8y ago
  WhatsApp groups seem to be popular
  - Arn_Thor 8y ago
    Yeah, but they're not perfect. You quickly end up with groups containing mostly the same friends, but different configurations of them depending on the event and exactly who you want to include in each discussion. It's a headache, really
- myth_buster 8y ago
  > The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. Google has ML based version of circle where depending on who is on the photo or whom you have added as recipient it suggests additional recipients. To me that is a better UX. a. They don't have to explicitly create circles. b. If you keep adding someone new or remove someone over a period of time, the model would learn that and act accordingly. c. If user wants to explicitly create a circle, they can probably do it as a group.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"? At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels... And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...
interlocutor 8y ago
>> Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. Sounds like you need https://circles.app https://circles.app
evgen 8y ago
There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunities more visible.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups. IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful. It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
    - hanspeter 8y ago
      They were easy and intuitive. Facebook didn't promote them for the same reason the circles in Google+ lacked traction: The majority of users didn't care and didn't want it.
  - stedaniels 8y ago
    Alas, the concept was never fleshed out and is all but buried and featureless.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      hmmm, I've been using it since it came out and still use it. Yes the UI is a little crap but basically every time you post there's a tiny drop down you can set which groups can see and which groups can't. It will stay on whatever you last chose. Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list. Have also excluded family for a few posts.
amyjess 8y ago
> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. You can do that already, with lists. Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
To be fair Google+ just straight up stole the circle idea from that Path social network after failing to buy them.
- srtjstjsj 8y ago
  Can you share evidence that Path had circles?
  - crunchlibrarian 8y ago
    I cannot track down any screenshots of how Path worked in the early days, only some media buzz around Path declining Google's buyout offer shortly before they launched + So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.
tinyhouse 8y ago
It's a nice idea in theory but I prefer the current solution of completely separating your circles into different apps. Work/Career - LinkedIn, topics of interest - Twitter/Reddit, personal stuff - FB, etc. If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.
Jach 8y ago
I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.
- JoblessWonder 8y ago
  On Day 2 I realized I was going to spend more time managing my circles than ever posting something to Google+. That was the moment I stopped logging in. (I like your idea of circle management. If they had adopted some sort of algorithmic approach where it "guessed" groups based on mutual interests/connections/etc then that would have worked too. "We've automatically created a group based on your University, when we add someone we will let you know!")
  - bootlooped 8y ago
    I can't imagine how I would spend very much time managing circles had I used Google+ more. The day I add somebody is the day I determine what circle(s) they would go into. For most people I know they would stay in those initial circles permanently. Moving contacts between, say, friends and work acquaintances would be pretty infrequent. How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them? ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.
    - JoblessWonder 8y ago
      Yeah, good points. I haven't used G+ in so long that I've forgotten the process. I think it was because I had way too many groups that I thought I was going to use, so each new connection required more though than necessary. You are right though, once you put someone in a group there isn't much more management necessary.
at-fates-hands 8y ago
> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform. I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively. This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process. Insanely, insanely hard.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  Totally agree. FB's massive user base + user inertia = FB's killer feature. Which, IMHO, means Google didn't understand what it was doing when it started G+.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    TBF, FB didn't either.
    - at-fates-hands 8y ago
      I'm not sure. Wasn't the underlying principle always to connect everybody in the world? I think FB has done a fair job of doing that. They just tapped into one of the basic tenets of the human condition; the desire to be connected to another human.
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        Having and understanding goals are not synonymouss. Does this date to TheFacebook (Harvard)?
- soylentcola 8y ago
sergiotapia 8y ago
There's no amount of marketing and assurances that would make me believe circles would keep my private life private. It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.
dekhn 8y ago
There was an entire presentation made by a product manager at Google on circles: https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-netwo... The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem). it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product. Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.
- smelendez 8y ago
  I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps. Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.
  - derefr 8y ago
    That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it. So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)
bwooceli 8y ago
Facebook groups are the next best thing (but still pretty terrible as it requires reciprocal participation)
signal11 8y ago
I found Google+ circles time-consuming to maintain. Facebook actually had a better idea with Graph Search, which would have let me direct a post to “my friends from Boston”, or “friends of my friends who like hiking”. Sadly it probably was too “power-user” a feature for Facebook.
ma2rten 8y ago
I disagree. I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air. However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.
- mcastillon 8y ago
  It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  "... out of thin air" I'd say, rather, "out of Gmail account users"
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    And even then it was 'invite only' for a fairly long time, creating an artificial desire.
AsyncAwait 8y ago
> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.
- usr1106 8y ago
  >But Diaspora has them. Oh is diaspora still alive? I would use it, but I'd guess I'd have even fewer friends there than on Google+
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    It has a dedicated number of users. Network effect is always going to be a problem. But beyond that, Diaspora is pretty functional. And pretty easy to use - the docs make it look a lot more complicated than it is. It isn't as featureful (no galleries, no events/calendars). If all you want to do is post and share, and have the privacy of Google+'s circles, Diaspora will do it for you.
- Shish2k 8y ago
  > I don't think Facebook will add them Facebook already has them...
throwaway2016a 8y ago
They actually borrowed[0] the circles idea from a Lycos product from 10 years earlier that was actually called Circles.[1] [0] No idea if anyone on the Google team had actually used Lycos Circles but it's not unreasonable to think they might of. [1] https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550 https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550
PaulHoule 8y ago
Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works? That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc. Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective. The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control. Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
It sorta exists it's called Friend Lists: https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128 https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128 Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.
Angostura 8y ago
I loved the idea of Circles and I used Google+ a lot in the early days. It all seemed to go to shit with the unified account business.
agumonkey 8y ago
I found the circle pitch amazing, but in practice meh. That said G+ attracted a bunch of guys who gave me very nice streams of informations of all kinds. Some circles weren't as good in other network like twitter or reddit.
Gokenstein 8y ago
Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups. Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)
spaceman1331 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) ouch
JepZ 8y ago
Nextcloud [1] (Federated Groupware) has the concept of circles [2], but yes, that's probably not what you meant with social network ;-) [1]: https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com [2]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
I'm surprised there is not a third party facebook app that can do that for you?
ISL 8y ago
Circles is/was awesome, but it lacks the virality and oversharing present in the Facebook ecosystem. With FB, it was essentially (yes, one can fine-grain it, but it isn't straightforward) all or nothing, and people preferred all to nothing.
Findeton 8y ago
I agree that the "circles" idea is good, and that's why I'm implementing it in my social network. However the idea of circles by itself is not good enough for people to make the move.You need something else too..
spullara 8y ago
Facebook had this feature from the beginning until August 8th, 2018. They were called Friend Lists and you could filter your feed using them. They also can be used for restricting access to content and that feature still exists.
Pxtl 8y ago
Imho, with Google's raft of products, I think they used it wrong. Google didn't really need a Facebook. However, it did have room for a Disqus. They shouldve started with an improved system for comment pages on Blogger and YouTube (and heck, other products like Google News) and built out a social network from there, not the other way around.
madrox 8y ago
The release was definitely terrible, but ironically not for the typical reasons of the time...namely servers falling over. From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Agreed. I remember the first person I knew with a gmail account, back in 2003. I remember when I first heard of facebook. Being stuck with a "What is this?" thought for months was my problem and their lucky strike.
vidarh 8y ago
This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people. We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate. Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends. And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out. Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.
- qunow 8y ago
  That also allowed Google+ to be used for virtual relationship with virtual identify far better than Facebook, although that is something Google dislike and constantly trying to crack down.
colek42 8y ago
I unfollowed everyone except close family and a few local communities, buisnesses I actually care about. Now Facebook is great, now when I check it is has content I actually care about. FYI, there are tools to help you unfollow your 1000 friends...
TallGuyShort 8y ago
I liked the idea of circles when posting, not just consuming. I know my work and university friends would appreciate techy stuff, but not my regular social circle. Same is true of my communities of which I'm a part. On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.
andrewxhill 8y ago
Take a look at what we're up to with https://textile.photos https://textile.photos. Threads are private groups you can create and share with (currently photos, later any content). Very circle like.
tempestn 8y ago
Very much agree. I've ended up using Instagram as a de facto circle of people I actually care about, and rarely use up facebook proper, except to connect with more distant acquaintances.
deftnerd 8y ago
MySpace had one clever thing going for it, and that was your "Top 8". People had to choose who would be in their "Top 8" friends listed on their profile page, and being selected by a friend was considered a badge of honor in the friendship. Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.
yason 8y ago
You can create lists in Facebook and classify people into close friends, acquaintances, and restricted classes. You can view the feed from those lists if you want. It's more cumbersome than Google+ but you can do something similar on Facebook. I even have a list of all friends to actually see each and every update from all of them if I have the time and not the fraction of them that Facebook usually serves me.
emp_ 8y ago
I'm working on something that, to this day, is inspired on circles -- I just think the execution was really poor, the UX of having to always decide who sees what is just too heavy and there are better ways to approach this lovely idea.
Razengan 8y ago
I think one of the main mistakes which every big company makes, when introducing a new service or product that's different from their usual space/expertise, is to put the company's name on it. Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name. Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence. But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it. In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.) Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them. I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services. Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.
telaport 8y ago
My problem with Google is how terrible they've proven to be at building consumer software. The Google + news today just set me off even more than usual. All this search ad revenue has them drunk on power with zero concern for providing the end user with actually useful software. I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing. Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is. So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY. Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful. Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.
netcan 8y ago
I don't think you can put it down to "terrible marketing and release." Even a crappy release from Google still gave G÷ access and exposure to Google's enourmous user base. G+ got to feature in results whenever you Googled a name... it's 100 times the exposure any upstart social network could hope to achieve, even with genius marketing. At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it. Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal. Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders. Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email. Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future. Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  Maybe, but I think that g+ failure just comes down to network effects. I made the switch, loved it, but my friends didn't follow.
_pmf_ 8y ago
I dearly miss the concept of circles in Twitter, both in incoming direction (filtering by what kind of stuff you'd want to read right now) and more important in outgoing direction (so I don't offend my fragile dev-o-sphere snowflake followers with manosphere or alt-right retweets). Requires 2 things: - feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them) - feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle). AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.
gfo 8y ago
I wrote a report in my freshman year of college on Google+ and how it was going to be "the next big thing in social media" due to Circles and how easy they were to use (I even got A!). I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

I was just about to post that Facebook has Friend List feeds, but it appears they're sunsetting that feature as of August 8th. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-friend-list-feeds-today/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

Sharlin 8y ago
FB has been slowly making friend lists even less accessible than before, so no wonder nobody's using them. Currently just making a status update visible only to a given list requires a ridiculous exertion: Open privacy dropdown -> select "More" -> select "See all" (the fuck?) -> click "Custom" -> TYPE a prefix of the friend list name in the combobox -> select the list you want from the dropdown.
coltonv 8y ago
I had no idea this feature even existed. It was well hidden.

deleted 8y ago

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cronz 8y ago

The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. Facebook on the other hand offers the same functionality but it's "buried" so you can use it at your convenience.

deleted 8y ago
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rikkus 8y ago
WhatsApp groups seem to be popular
- Arn_Thor 8y ago
  Yeah, but they're not perfect. You quickly end up with groups containing mostly the same friends, but different configurations of them depending on the event and exactly who you want to include in each discussion. It's a headache, really
myth_buster 8y ago
> The idea of circles sounds fantastic on paper but it's simply too much work for the common user. Google has ML based version of circle where depending on who is on the photo or whom you have added as recipient it suggests additional recipients. To me that is a better UX. a. They don't have to explicitly create circles. b. If you keep adding someone new or remove someone over a period of time, the model would learn that and act accordingly. c. If user wants to explicitly create a circle, they can probably do it as a group.
coldtea 8y ago
>For most of the posts users would make, users would probably spend more time thinking about which circles to enable than actually writing the post. It's a headache and it leads to a poor experience, it feels like a hurdle, something you must do; it makes posting less natural. How low have we got, capacity wise, when this is even considered "a hurdle"? At one time, people had to walk to the TV to change the channels... And before that, they had to have candles and be good with finger shadows to entertain themselves...

interlocutor 8y ago

>> Given hundreds of acquaintances, this is a pain, and made me give up on Facebook altogether. Sounds like you need https://circles.app https://circles.app

evgen 8y ago

There is no way Facebook would ever implement something like this. The whole point of the Facebook feed tinkering is to force you to wade through a river of shit to find the nuggets you are interested in. The feed algorithm is all about making that river just slightly short of unbearable, because the river is where they stuff all the ads. If they provided you with useful filters it would make the revenue opportunities more visible.

IshKebab 8y ago
Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups.
- 394549 8y ago
  > Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups. IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful. It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.
  - hanspeter 8y ago
    They were easy and intuitive. Facebook didn't promote them for the same reason the circles in Google+ lacked traction: The majority of users didn't care and didn't want it.
- stedaniels 8y ago
  Alas, the concept was never fleshed out and is all but buried and featureless.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    hmmm, I've been using it since it came out and still use it. Yes the UI is a little crap but basically every time you post there's a tiny drop down you can set which groups can see and which groups can't. It will stay on whatever you last chose. Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list. Have also excluded family for a few posts.

amyjess 8y ago

> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook, as it would allow me to filter down my feed to just the people I really care about but still have a connection to more distance acquaintances. You can do that already, with lists. Unfortunately, the UI for lists isn't great, but when you figure out how (it took me long enough), you can view a feed of just people on a certain list or post to just one list if you want.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

To be fair Google+ just straight up stole the circle idea from that Path social network after failing to buy them.

srtjstjsj 8y ago
Can you share evidence that Path had circles?
- crunchlibrarian 8y ago
  I cannot track down any screenshots of how Path worked in the early days, only some media buzz around Path declining Google's buyout offer shortly before they launched + So many old apps and services are just forgotten now, it's hard to prove any claim about who stole what idea. Kind of a shame really, so much of our digital history is effectively unknowable and lost forever.

tinyhouse 8y ago

It's a nice idea in theory but I prefer the current solution of completely separating your circles into different apps. Work/Career - LinkedIn, topics of interest - Twitter/Reddit, personal stuff - FB, etc. If your feed is spammy you should unfriend/unfollow the users who you don't want to see.

Jach 8y ago

I was excited about the "circles" idea on day one, but on day two I realized it was basically useless because it didn't let you create ad-hoc circle-groups based on venn diagram unions and intersections and differences, and their APIs were read-only so you couldn't hack this on top. I haven't cared about Google+ since.

JoblessWonder 8y ago
On Day 2 I realized I was going to spend more time managing my circles than ever posting something to Google+. That was the moment I stopped logging in. (I like your idea of circle management. If they had adopted some sort of algorithmic approach where it "guessed" groups based on mutual interests/connections/etc then that would have worked too. "We've automatically created a group based on your University, when we add someone we will let you know!")
- bootlooped 8y ago
  I can't imagine how I would spend very much time managing circles had I used Google+ more. The day I add somebody is the day I determine what circle(s) they would go into. For most people I know they would stay in those initial circles permanently. Moving contacts between, say, friends and work acquaintances would be pretty infrequent. How do you imagine you would spend that much time managing them? ML suggesting or guessing groups automatically would lessen the requirements of the user, but it was already pretty easy I thought.
  - JoblessWonder 8y ago
    Yeah, good points. I haven't used G+ in so long that I've forgotten the process. I think it was because I had way too many groups that I thought I was going to use, so each new connection required more though than necessary. You are right though, once you put someone in a group there isn't much more management necessary.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

> Google+ had terrible marketing and release, but it had some decent ideas that I wish other networks had carried over. While I agree with your points, nobody ever mentions how hard it is got get people off of FB and ONTO their social media platform. I remember when this came out and I did like a number of the features over FB. After some, "Hey, Google+ does this so much better than FB, you should swtich to G+!" posts, and nobody switching. I just found some friends used both, but eventually went back to just using FB exclusively. This has always been the Achilles heel of anybody who wants to compete with FB. It's not about features, it's about how are you going to get all these people, with all of these deep rooted connections, to leave FB and not just join YOUR network, but to stay and bring all their friends in the process. Insanely, insanely hard.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
Totally agree. FB's massive user base + user inertia = FB's killer feature. Which, IMHO, means Google didn't understand what it was doing when it started G+.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  TBF, FB didn't either.
  - at-fates-hands 8y ago
    I'm not sure. Wasn't the underlying principle always to connect everybody in the world? I think FB has done a fair job of doing that. They just tapped into one of the basic tenets of the human condition; the desire to be connected to another human.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Having and understanding goals are not synonymouss. Does this date to TheFacebook (Harvard)?
soylentcola 8y ago

sergiotapia 8y ago

There's no amount of marketing and assurances that would make me believe circles would keep my private life private. It's the reason why I never used Google Plus. And it's the reason why when I had a facebook account I never friended coworkers or professional contacts.

dekhn 8y ago

There was an entire presentation made by a product manager at Google on circles: https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 https://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-netwo... The presentation was amazing and I can definitely believe is influenced leadership at Google to make a product that was "better" for people who have complicated social networks (the "I want to go to a rave on the weekend and share those photos with my friends, and then go to a wedding and share the photos with my parents" problem). it's unfortunate the the leadership (mainly Vic but enabled by a bunch of other people) ran with this idea but ended up making such a dislikable product. Anecdote: when Google+ Events launched at IO, I had to give up my practice spot on stage so that Vic could practice his product demo. Events is now gone- it wasn't very popular- but the product I demo'd (Google Compute Engine) is now a major source of growth. Oh, and the other reason I didn't get to practice was Sergey practicing the launch demo for Google Glass (the amazing parachute jump). That's also a product that is in the dustbin. AFAICT the leadership just didn't understand how badly it understood the market for social, cloud, and consumer products.

smelendez 8y ago
I think the real solution to this turned out to be using different apps. Maybe Facebook for general friends and family posts, Snapchat with friends, WhatsApp chat with another group of friends, Twitter for truly public posts, Slack for work, etc.
- derefr 8y ago
  That only works for about seven years at a time, though. Eventually, the app where your college-aged college friends are (Facebook) becomes the app where the adult-aged friends you know from college are (Facebook), becomes the app that the next generation thinks of as "the app their parents use", and therefore don't want to post anything public to lest some adult who knows their parents sees it. So far, I'm pretty happy with the "isolated communities with shared identities" model of Slack/Discord. I feel like something that took that model and made it into a social network would be popular. (No, not like Reddit. Picture, say, Tumblr, but you can't reblog something if it's not from your community, instead only being able to create your own original link-post to it that doesn't propagate its interactions back to the community of the post it links to. So you have one shared piece of Original Content, but each community has its own sandboxed graph of likes and shares and comments and other interactions built around that Original Content.)

bwooceli 8y ago

Facebook groups are the next best thing (but still pretty terrible as it requires reciprocal participation)

signal11 8y ago

I found Google+ circles time-consuming to maintain. Facebook actually had a better idea with Graph Search, which would have let me direct a post to “my friends from Boston”, or “friends of my friends who like hiking”. Sadly it probably was too “power-user” a feature for Facebook.

ma2rten 8y ago

I disagree. I think Google+ had great marketing and release. Good enough to create a social network with 300 million monthly active users out of thin air. However the product did not provide enough value for people to keep using it. The circles idea was good, but the improvement is too incremental. I am also wondering if the average user really understood that idea and cared enough to put in the effort to separate their contacts.

mcastillon 8y ago
It could be argued that by focusing on the wide release, they inherently doomed the product. Hard to build a cohesive community of 300M when the stickiness factor doesn't exist yet. Arguably would have been better to focus on limited releases on niche communities to create that stickiness/increase retention.
chrisweekly 8y ago
"... out of thin air" I'd say, rather, "out of Gmail account users"
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  And even then it was 'invite only' for a fairly long time, creating an artificial desire.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

> The idea of "circles", where you had a circle for "acquaintances" "friends", "family" would be great on, say, Facebook I don't think Facebook will add them, but Diaspora has them.

usr1106 8y ago
>But Diaspora has them. Oh is diaspora still alive? I would use it, but I'd guess I'd have even fewer friends there than on Google+
- BeetleB 8y ago
  It has a dedicated number of users. Network effect is always going to be a problem. But beyond that, Diaspora is pretty functional. And pretty easy to use - the docs make it look a lot more complicated than it is. It isn't as featureful (no galleries, no events/calendars). If all you want to do is post and share, and have the privacy of Google+'s circles, Diaspora will do it for you.
Shish2k 8y ago
> I don't think Facebook will add them Facebook already has them...

throwaway2016a 8y ago

They actually borrowed[0] the circles idea from a Lycos product from 10 years earlier that was actually called Circles.[1] [0] No idea if anyone on the Google team had actually used Lycos Circles but it's not unreasonable to think they might of. [1] https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550 https://info.lycos.com/about/press/?pressReleaseId=1550

PaulHoule 8y ago

Didn't the circles work in the opposite direction of how Facebook works? That is, you are not subscribing to circles on various topics of things to receive, but you are creating circles of people you can send things to: so you can send family stuff to your family, technical stuff to technical people, etc. Hypothetically a good idea but it is still seeing the world from a sender's perspective as opposed to a receiver's perspective. The more immediate problem though is that we are all getting hit with a large number of messages (in the most general sense including e-mail, physical mail, social media, TV, ...) and I think we could use our own filtering A.I. that we control. Another principle I see is replacing "scanning" (eg. loading a feed over and over again) with a workflow based on "say something once, why say it again?" That is you should never see anything in your feed more than once. Maybe you could go back and search or browse for it, but you should not be reloading just on the hope that you'll see something new and interesting.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

It sorta exists it's called Friend Lists: https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128 https://www.facebook.com/help/204604196335128 Sadly it seems they've hidden this to push their more tailored feed so they can push whatever ads and things through there aka filter (censor?) your friends posts better.

Angostura 8y ago

I loved the idea of Circles and I used Google+ a lot in the early days. It all seemed to go to shit with the unified account business.

agumonkey 8y ago

I found the circle pitch amazing, but in practice meh. That said G+ attracted a bunch of guys who gave me very nice streams of informations of all kinds. Some circles weren't as good in other network like twitter or reddit.

Gokenstein 8y ago

Apparently my brother's college roommate is a UX designer who worked on Google+ and he told my brother that he was directly inspired by the way I used AIM at the time. I had different screen names for different groups of friends and I would sign into AIM at different times of night with different screen names to chat with all these different groups. Don't really have a point, just wanted to brag. :-)

spaceman1331 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel) ouch

JepZ 8y ago

Nextcloud [1] (Federated Groupware) has the concept of circles [2], but yes, that's probably not what you meant with social network ;-) [1]: https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com [2]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/circles

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

I'm surprised there is not a third party facebook app that can do that for you?

ISL 8y ago

Circles is/was awesome, but it lacks the virality and oversharing present in the Facebook ecosystem. With FB, it was essentially (yes, one can fine-grain it, but it isn't straightforward) all or nothing, and people preferred all to nothing.

Findeton 8y ago

I agree that the "circles" idea is good, and that's why I'm implementing it in my social network. However the idea of circles by itself is not good enough for people to make the move.You need something else too..

spullara 8y ago

Facebook had this feature from the beginning until August 8th, 2018. They were called Friend Lists and you could filter your feed using them. They also can be used for restricting access to content and that feature still exists.

Pxtl 8y ago

Imho, with Google's raft of products, I think they used it wrong. Google didn't really need a Facebook. However, it did have room for a Disqus. They shouldve started with an improved system for comment pages on Blogger and YouTube (and heck, other products like Google News) and built out a social network from there, not the other way around.

madrox 8y ago

The release was definitely terrible, but ironically not for the typical reasons of the time...namely servers falling over. From my POV, the release was terrible because it let people in too fast. Social networks need to go through a period where only the "cool kids" are there. It creates a network effect. It was kind of impossible to go through that, so being on Google+ conveyed no status...in fact, it kind of did the opposite.

killjoywashere 8y ago
Agreed. I remember the first person I knew with a gmail account, back in 2003. I remember when I first heard of facebook. Being stuck with a "What is this?" thought for months was my problem and their lucky strike.

vidarh 8y ago

This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people. We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate. Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends. And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out. Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.

qunow 8y ago
That also allowed Google+ to be used for virtual relationship with virtual identify far better than Facebook, although that is something Google dislike and constantly trying to crack down.

colek42 8y ago

I unfollowed everyone except close family and a few local communities, buisnesses I actually care about. Now Facebook is great, now when I check it is has content I actually care about. FYI, there are tools to help you unfollow your 1000 friends...

TallGuyShort 8y ago

I liked the idea of circles when posting, not just consuming. I know my work and university friends would appreciate techy stuff, but not my regular social circle. Same is true of my communities of which I'm a part. On the other hand, this can enforce echo chambers, but as long as one is aware of that effect (and sadly, most wouldn't care), I really like broadly selecting my audience.

andrewxhill 8y ago

Take a look at what we're up to with https://textile.photos https://textile.photos. Threads are private groups you can create and share with (currently photos, later any content). Very circle like.

tempestn 8y ago

Very much agree. I've ended up using Instagram as a de facto circle of people I actually care about, and rarely use up facebook proper, except to connect with more distant acquaintances.

deftnerd 8y ago

MySpace had one clever thing going for it, and that was your "Top 8". People had to choose who would be in their "Top 8" friends listed on their profile page, and being selected by a friend was considered a badge of honor in the friendship. Having circles, which is in essence tags, to place your contacts in is a great feature, but if a social networking site did that and also let you sort them by how meaningful those contacts are to you, it would allow the site to do more meaningful content filtering and promotion, as well as let people express the importance of those contacts within the tagged groups.

yason 8y ago

You can create lists in Facebook and classify people into close friends, acquaintances, and restricted classes. You can view the feed from those lists if you want. It's more cumbersome than Google+ but you can do something similar on Facebook. I even have a list of all friends to actually see each and every update from all of them if I have the time and not the fraction of them that Facebook usually serves me.

emp_ 8y ago

I'm working on something that, to this day, is inspired on circles -- I just think the execution was really poor, the UX of having to always decide who sees what is just too heavy and there are better ways to approach this lovely idea.

Razengan 8y ago

I think one of the main mistakes which every big company makes, when introducing a new service or product that's different from their usual space/expertise, is to put the company's name on it. Microsoft is the biggest offenders in this, since time immemorial, with an almost sad sort of attention-seeking "Look look we made this!" by prefixing every product and service with their name. Of course I see why they would want to do this; it entices your existing fans to check it out and bolsters confidence. But the problem is that your company's reputation and "image" is then immediately projected onto your new product before anyone even tries it. In Microsoft's case it's their sterile 90s-suit-and-tie-office-workplace, wannabe-cool /r/fellowkids image (in my view at least.) Even Apple does this and it adversely affects their new products too (like Apple Music) for people who hold some kind of brand grudge against them. I and I'll assume many people use Google out of necessity than any brand loyalty, and in spite of disagreeing with their privacy-hostile core model. If they hadn't bought YouTube and if other search engines were as fast and provided as relevant results (though Google Search has been slowly crapping out in that regard since the past couple years), I would be using no Google products or services. Google were hardly associated with the word "social" and "Google+" doesn't say anything about anything social. The first impressions of most people when hearing about it very probably did nothing favorable for the service.

telaport 8y ago

My problem with Google is how terrible they've proven to be at building consumer software. The Google + news today just set me off even more than usual. All this search ad revenue has them drunk on power with zero concern for providing the end user with actually useful software. I can't think of one piece of Google software, except maybe YouTube that is enjoyable to use or at least decent. Even then, this doesn't exempt Google from being idiots with how they treat content creators on YouTube. Everywhere you look they do some absolutely terrible thing, or some completely incompetent thing. Take email. I loved Inbox. They killed it. Like most of their acquisitions or other projects, they kill everything. It would make sense if they integrated Inbox features into Gmail mobile and desktop apps and then killed it, but no. They just killed the useful application and kept Gmail an ancient turd of a client the way it is. So you would think it's no big deal - just switch to another email client. The only problem, they all suck. Edison molests your data unless you opt out of every app install for sharing your email or useage data, and then if you want to scrub your info from their servers (which I'm pretty sure is BS) you can't actually use their app. So... Switch to Spark and it seems decent but you can't do inline images in emails on mobile - only attachments. I need to send customers inline images while on the go so that's the end of Spark. Meanwhile on the Mac you CAN send in-line images. But guess what? The Spark Mac app has every option EXCEPT a taskbar icon and badge count (you can look in your MenuBar but are SOL if you prefer to have it hidden. Next up, AirMail3 is another turd. AirMail3 seemed awesome, but the first time I tried composing a simple email to family it found every damn contact EXCEPT the everyday contact I would use. Maybe it needs to learn over time so I give it some time... Well, it still decides to match every possible iteration of something I search for - for any type of search. I think I'm typing an email from "XXXX YYYYY" and I get back every email or contact from every duration that somehow even every possible match that might include a variation of XX YY. Jebus. Seriously Google - F U. It's incredible to me that they don't seem to give a S@#$ that they're making people go through all this. People are spend monthly on email clients from some 3rd party that is doing god knows what with our data and Google refuses to improve their own stupid products but also insists on killing any they own that are actually useful. Forget "Don't be Evil" you clowns, maybe just focus on "Make Uncompromised Products" - Google: you suck at writing decent software applications. Period.

netcan 8y ago

I don't think you can put it down to "terrible marketing and release." Even a crappy release from Google still gave G÷ access and exposure to Google's enourmous user base. G+ got to feature in results whenever you Googled a name... it's 100 times the exposure any upstart social network could hope to achieve, even with genius marketing. At some point, it's up to the product. If you can't succeed with that much exposure, the product wasn't right. People didn't get it, didn't care or didn't want it. Circles (and other ideas, some going back to wave) is more like goals than ideas. The goal is to have different categories of friends to control what you see, and who sees which of your stuff. You still need an idea for achieving that goal. Google's idea put too many confusing choices in users hands. It's like the difference between Gmail's search-centric UI and outlook's folders. Folders are great, if everything is in folders. Search works no matter what, no inbox management necessary. The folders that work best, work by default too (updates, promotions, junk...). No sitting down and pondering how one would like to use email. Google's "idea" for achieving their goals was asking users to think of how they'd like to use this thing they've never used before and do some preparatory work, like categorising friends they might connect to in the future. Abstract questions are always harder than they seem. Asking users to create abstractions is tricky.

your-nanny 8y ago
Maybe, but I think that g+ failure just comes down to network effects. I made the switch, loved it, but my friends didn't follow.

_pmf_ 8y ago

I dearly miss the concept of circles in Twitter, both in incoming direction (filtering by what kind of stuff you'd want to read right now) and more important in outgoing direction (so I don't offend my fragile dev-o-sphere snowflake followers with manosphere or alt-right retweets). Requires 2 things: - feature to classifying your followers into circles (unbeknownst to them) - feature to select target circle for a tweet/retweet/like (or, more comfortable, classify people I follow into the same circle, and making retweets/likes per-circle). AFAICT, gab.ai does not have anything like this, either.

gfo 8y ago

I wrote a report in my freshman year of college on Google+ and how it was going to be "the next big thing in social media" due to Circles and how easy they were to use (I even got A!). I still wish these had caught on more, or at least that Facebook hadn't implemented Friend Lists as an answer to this that they all but bury in their UI. It would be a much more tolerable place if they made it easier to use this, but similarly, if you have to categorize people in such a way that you rarely see their posts, what is the point of "keeping in touch" via Facebook in the first place? At least for me, if I don't care enough to see your updates (or at least the memes you like) on my news feed I may not think to look at your profile.