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> 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 do

> 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.
- vannevar 8y ago
  A really key piece of information missing from that algorithm is your relationship with the people posting. Sure, an algorithm could infer that, but right now they're terrible at it. Why not just let people specify their relationship and how often they want to see content from someone? Facebook's problem from a user perspective is that the ideal social network for users looks nothing like the ideal social network for maximum profitability, which is what they're trying to build. FB's only hope for the future is to use marketing to convince people that they actually want its brand of dystopia.
vannevar 8y ago
I agree, I think Circles was great. Between family and actual friends, most people have probably less than 100 contacts to manage. The rest could be lumped into Followers. Even for those, over time, machine learning models could suggest circles to put them in, or even assign them automatically with a manual override if you didn't like the placement. But the basic idea of Circles is sound, and the biggest thing wrong with Facebook (from a user perspective, anyway), is that it doesn't provide something comparable.

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.
vannevar 8y ago
A really key piece of information missing from that algorithm is your relationship with the people posting. Sure, an algorithm could infer that, but right now they're terrible at it. Why not just let people specify their relationship and how often they want to see content from someone? Facebook's problem from a user perspective is that the ideal social network for users looks nothing like the ideal social network for maximum profitability, which is what they're trying to build. FB's only hope for the future is to use marketing to convince people that they actually want its brand of dystopia.

vannevar 8y ago

I agree, I think Circles was great. Between family and actual friends, most people have probably less than 100 contacts to manage. The rest could be lumped into Followers. Even for those, over time, machine learning models could suggest circles to put them in, or even assign them automatically with a manual override if you didn't like the placement. But the basic idea of Circles is sound, and the biggest thing wrong with Facebook (from a user perspective, anyway), is that it doesn't provide something comparable.