5 ms·

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo

by erikig 8y ago

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

LanceH 8y ago
This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  I 100% agree, however I really didn't like manually curating those circles ... I share a relatively diverse set of things/interests, so would have loved to leave it up to the other party which facet of my "feed" they could have subscribed to. This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comments like, "I wish I could just filter out pictures of babies and dogs!".
  - AlanSE 8y ago
    Any system that requires manual curating of these things by the user is doomed to fail. I'm probably the demographic most prone to try features, so I'll try to make some circles, but I have to admit failure. Even whatever you called it in livejournal where you had specific sharing groups of friends - that was a burden to maintain. I eventually lost track of my organization. It just wasn't worth it.
    - LanceH 8y ago
      All the automated systems fail as well. I don't see any way the overlaps can be automated without some people either missing out, or other people getting a bit much.
  - naravara 8y ago
    The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch of friends.
    - CodeCube 8y ago
      This is a fantastic point! Over time, the number of group chats in FB Messenger has grown, and it totally meets this usage.
      - naravara 8y ago
        I also remember reading about this thing the "kids" are doing these days where they just spin up a dummy private instagram account and give a bunch of friends the password. The instagram account winds up becoming a sort of ersatz web forum that they use to plan social outings and share pictures. Inviting new people is as easy as giving them an invite to follow. Granting write/mod access is as easy as giving them account username/pass. It's a pretty clever hack to turn Instagram into a micro-forum. And it winds up being a better implementation of circles. The "circle" is object of interest. It's not a categorization that you put people in, it's an entity in its own right.
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      Couldn’t you have the same person in multiple circles?
      - LanceH 8y ago
        Yes.
- eitland 8y ago
  Actually to be honest, Circles wouldn't always preventing them from learning that they were both connected to you. After messing up badly in the nymwars, forcibly joining together YouTube accounts with Gmail accounts they actually made a heavyweight but working solution: It was given the name Pages which was more or less meaningless IMO (in this context). What it felt like at the time however was a powerful solution for switching between pseudonyms connected to your account. That said: Given a large reason for why Google+ is shutting down was that they had a couple of huge data leaks maybe we should all be glad kt wasn't too widely used :-]
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Given a large reason for why Google+ is shutting down was that they had a couple of huge data leaks maybe we should all be glad kt wasn't too widely used That's the reason it's already planned shutdown was accelerated, but the leaks occurred after it was essentially abandoned to palliative care. Had it been sufficiently used, and therefore actively maintained, they may not have occurred.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    If something is public (and often even if it isn't), it's public. I never viewed Circles so much about hiding information from other Circles. Rather, it was about acknowledging that my friends from school and other non-professional, well, circles mostly aren't interested in reading about my latest tech article. And at least some people who follow me professionally probably aren't interested in whether I think some movie is good or not. I really tried to be on team Google+ for a while but it was too little too late.
- ok_coo 8y ago
  For me, this was the biggest fail of Facebook and the main reason why I stopped using it about a year ago. Conversations are meant to be had with a certain group of people, not a random number of unknown people in your list. We need more control and that's why I think G+ circles was a really good idea.
- Yhippa 8y ago
  I'm honestly shocked they still haven't figured a way to make it easier to assure me I can post stuff without it leaking as you say. This was definitely cool about Google+.
rando444 8y ago
I was so excited for the circles so I could group content to an audience. I coerced a significant number of people to join Google+. I was let down when I found out that when I posted something, it would send people in that circle an e-mail notification. I stopped posting as soon as I saw that. I'd much rather have people check on my interests at their leisure than having my content forced on them.
verytrivial 8y ago
I was thinking exactly this whilst unfollowing people on Twitter who weren't feeding my hopeless obsession with Brexit. Hashtags are too ephemeral and gamed.
rst 8y ago
Unfortunately, when last I looked, there was no way to add yourself to a particular circle of some other user -- so if you wanted, say, Jennifer 8 Lee's articles, but didn't want your feed cluttered up with her pictures of dishes from restaurants, you had to ask her to do something individually. For people with diverse interests and large follower counts, this really doesn't scale.
- saurik 8y ago
  Yeah: this aspect--where the circles were essentially backwards--made the feature essentially useless. I post stuff about Android, and I post stuff about iOS, and I post stuff about abstract programming languages. Great! So I make three circles, and then... wait, users don't add themselves to my circles, they just follow my entire account and then I have to add people to the right circles somehow? ?!?
  - delecti 8y ago
    Circles are a great solution for social circles on a social network. I think most people who post like you describe would just use a mailing list, or a blog with multiple RSS feeds.
- eitland 8y ago
  Agree. They later (?) introduced collections which solved this (and I've written about it in my post) but at that time I guess tve famage was done.
dgzl 8y ago
I too was excited about the idea of circles for managing viability. It seemed really simple and intuitive for a problem most social media platforms botch.
notatoad 8y ago
I think Circles was a great example of what Google+ got wrong. If you are an alien species observing human interaction, you'll notice that it really is how people interact, they have different circles of friends or contacts that they might want to share things with, and a "circles" feature is a great way to organize your social network. What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. Our social circles are not hard-edged and fixed, they're fuzzy and context-dependent.
- jyrkesh 8y ago
  > What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news feed problem.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    It might be beneficial, but it is way too high-friction for most people. The group-based messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kakao, Discord have basically achieved this same concept of pre-defined audiences using a much more familiar and low-friction concept (rich group chat).
  - notatoad 8y ago
    The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.
    - naravara 8y ago
      They make the wrong call because they aren't focused on surfacing content you're interested in, they're focused on surfacing content that gets a rise out of you.
Terr_ 8y ago
Good: Circles as a way to separate social groups Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.
- robotbikes 8y ago
  Yeah I think Google really screwed up when they forced YouTube into the G+ framework and started enforcing a sort of real ID with small exceptions (allowing single letter initials). I think the exceptions can after an uproar. The biggest challenge was people didn't see a reason to use it since the market was already saturated. Also they didn't provide any good tools for automating content creation which helped them avoid spam but also made it less than trivial for content creators to implement a G+ presence.
  - Terr_ 8y ago
    To be fair, even if they had the system I wanted -- one where I can have different identities in different circles -- I would still worry about Google somehow "leaking" data accidentally or for advertising profit.

by erikig 8y ago

Circles Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.

LanceH 8y ago

This. I have family, military friends and recruiters and I don't want those conversations crossing over. With facebook, I have no idea what will leak across various groups of friends.

CodeCube 8y ago
I 100% agree, however I really didn't like manually curating those circles ... I share a relatively diverse set of things/interests, so would have loved to leave it up to the other party which facet of my "feed" they could have subscribed to. This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comments like, "I wish I could just filter out pictures of babies and dogs!".
- AlanSE 8y ago
  Any system that requires manual curating of these things by the user is doomed to fail. I'm probably the demographic most prone to try features, so I'll try to make some circles, but I have to admit failure. Even whatever you called it in livejournal where you had specific sharing groups of friends - that was a burden to maintain. I eventually lost track of my organization. It just wasn't worth it.
  - LanceH 8y ago
    All the automated systems fail as well. I don't see any way the overlaps can be automated without some people either missing out, or other people getting a bit much.
- naravara 8y ago
  The formality around making a discrete group of "Circles" was the problem. If they just let you have multiple feeds and you can add and remove people from those feeds it would have been fine. In those circumstances, the issue isn't you sitting there categorizing how close you are with each of your friends. You're just deciding who you want to share things with, it's not unlike a group chat you might have with a bunch of friends.
  - CodeCube 8y ago
    This is a fantastic point! Over time, the number of group chats in FB Messenger has grown, and it totally meets this usage.
    - naravara 8y ago
      I also remember reading about this thing the "kids" are doing these days where they just spin up a dummy private instagram account and give a bunch of friends the password. The instagram account winds up becoming a sort of ersatz web forum that they use to plan social outings and share pictures. Inviting new people is as easy as giving them an invite to follow. Granting write/mod access is as easy as giving them account username/pass. It's a pretty clever hack to turn Instagram into a micro-forum. And it winds up being a better implementation of circles. The "circle" is object of interest. It's not a categorization that you put people in, it's an entity in its own right.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    Couldn’t you have the same person in multiple circles?
    - LanceH 8y ago
      Yes.
eitland 8y ago
Actually to be honest, Circles wouldn't always preventing them from learning that they were both connected to you. After messing up badly in the nymwars, forcibly joining together YouTube accounts with Gmail accounts they actually made a heavyweight but working solution: It was given the name Pages which was more or less meaningless IMO (in this context). What it felt like at the time however was a powerful solution for switching between pseudonyms connected to your account. That said: Given a large reason for why Google+ is shutting down was that they had a couple of huge data leaks maybe we should all be glad kt wasn't too widely used :-]
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Given a large reason for why Google+ is shutting down was that they had a couple of huge data leaks maybe we should all be glad kt wasn't too widely used That's the reason it's already planned shutdown was accelerated, but the leaks occurred after it was essentially abandoned to palliative care. Had it been sufficiently used, and therefore actively maintained, they may not have occurred.
- ghaff 8y ago
  If something is public (and often even if it isn't), it's public. I never viewed Circles so much about hiding information from other Circles. Rather, it was about acknowledging that my friends from school and other non-professional, well, circles mostly aren't interested in reading about my latest tech article. And at least some people who follow me professionally probably aren't interested in whether I think some movie is good or not. I really tried to be on team Google+ for a while but it was too little too late.
ok_coo 8y ago
For me, this was the biggest fail of Facebook and the main reason why I stopped using it about a year ago. Conversations are meant to be had with a certain group of people, not a random number of unknown people in your list. We need more control and that's why I think G+ circles was a really good idea.
Yhippa 8y ago
I'm honestly shocked they still haven't figured a way to make it easier to assure me I can post stuff without it leaking as you say. This was definitely cool about Google+.

rando444 8y ago

I was so excited for the circles so I could group content to an audience. I coerced a significant number of people to join Google+. I was let down when I found out that when I posted something, it would send people in that circle an e-mail notification. I stopped posting as soon as I saw that. I'd much rather have people check on my interests at their leisure than having my content forced on them.

verytrivial 8y ago

I was thinking exactly this whilst unfollowing people on Twitter who weren't feeding my hopeless obsession with Brexit. Hashtags are too ephemeral and gamed.

rst 8y ago

Unfortunately, when last I looked, there was no way to add yourself to a particular circle of some other user -- so if you wanted, say, Jennifer 8 Lee's articles, but didn't want your feed cluttered up with her pictures of dishes from restaurants, you had to ask her to do something individually. For people with diverse interests and large follower counts, this really doesn't scale.

saurik 8y ago
Yeah: this aspect--where the circles were essentially backwards--made the feature essentially useless. I post stuff about Android, and I post stuff about iOS, and I post stuff about abstract programming languages. Great! So I make three circles, and then... wait, users don't add themselves to my circles, they just follow my entire account and then I have to add people to the right circles somehow? ?!?
- delecti 8y ago
  Circles are a great solution for social circles on a social network. I think most people who post like you describe would just use a mailing list, or a blog with multiple RSS feeds.
eitland 8y ago
Agree. They later (?) introduced collections which solved this (and I've written about it in my post) but at that time I guess tve famage was done.

dgzl 8y ago

I too was excited about the idea of circles for managing viability. It seemed really simple and intuitive for a problem most social media platforms botch.

notatoad 8y ago

I think Circles was a great example of what Google+ got wrong. If you are an alien species observing human interaction, you'll notice that it really is how people interact, they have different circles of friends or contacts that they might want to share things with, and a "circles" feature is a great way to organize your social network. What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. Our social circles are not hard-edged and fixed, they're fuzzy and context-dependent.

jyrkesh 8y ago
> What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town. I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news feed problem.
- aeternus 8y ago
  It might be beneficial, but it is way too high-friction for most people. The group-based messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kakao, Discord have basically achieved this same concept of pre-defined audiences using a much more familiar and low-friction concept (rich group chat).
- notatoad 8y ago
  The obvious solution to me is an intelligent algorithm that decides which of the content in your feed you'll be most interested in and surfaces that for you. And this is exactly what facebook is trying to do. It's obviously a difficult problem though, and they make the wrong call a lot of the time.
  - naravara 8y ago
    They make the wrong call because they aren't focused on surfacing content you're interested in, they're focused on surfacing content that gets a rise out of you.

Terr_ 8y ago

Good: Circles as a way to separate social groups Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.

robotbikes 8y ago
Yeah I think Google really screwed up when they forced YouTube into the G+ framework and started enforcing a sort of real ID with small exceptions (allowing single letter initials). I think the exceptions can after an uproar. The biggest challenge was people didn't see a reason to use it since the market was already saturated. Also they didn't provide any good tools for automating content creation which helped them avoid spam but also made it less than trivial for content creators to implement a G+ presence.
- Terr_ 8y ago
  To be fair, even if they had the system I wanted -- one where I can have different identities in different circles -- I would still worry about Google somehow "leaking" data accidentally or for advertising profit.