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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 v

by 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+.

by 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+.