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> It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more like Facebook. Circl
by kmavm 15y ago
> It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more like Facebook.
Circles are friend lists, a feature Facebook has had for three years. Facebook's friend lists actually do a few things that circles currently don't: for instance, you can post to the union of a set of friend lists with specific people excluded.
They're de-emphasized in the UI because, despite many iterations on it, and a prompt to this day to add new friends to a list, the overwhelming majority of users have never created or used one. The functionality has been there for years, so it is surprising to me that Google is pushing an essentially failed Facebook feature as their big differentiator.
- zaidf 15y agofor instance, you can post to the union of a set of friend lists with specific people excluded. Yup, I use this feature increasingly. I especially like the "Only Me" feature to share stuff I don't necessarily want to share with any of my friends but want to remember years down the line.
- rmc 15y agoA failed feature? Does it have less space than a nomad and no wifi? I'm sure it'll never catch on.
- kmavm 15y agoIt could very easily be the case that Facebook's difficulty in popularizing friend lists was somehow path-dependent: e.g., FB users weren't using it from the beginning, so users had a different model in mind. We agree, I am not saying that circles are hopeless just because they've already been tried. There seems to be a bogus meme propagating that Facebook doesn't have the functionality at all, though. You can do this stuff on Facebook if you're so inclined.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoFacebook doesn't have circles. All Facebook relationships are built on a friend request, which Google+ doesn't have. You can't add strangers to a Facebook list; they are not the same thing.
- zaidf 15y agoI actually dislike that about Google+. In the process of accommodating strangers, they have completely gone away from the concept of friending. May be this is why my Google+ stream is a lot more similar to my twitter than fb.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoI think Circles makes more sense. How you see others is not necessarily how they see you.
- jedberg 15y agoI hate the fact that the relationships aren't 2 way on G+. Today my wife was going through people to add on G+, and she kept asking me, "Who is this person, it says they are friends with you." And I had no idea who they were. They were people that had added me to a circle, but I never added back. Yet Google tells other people that we know each other. They make no differentiation between a 2 way relationship and a one way. This looks like spam heaven to me.
- zaidf 15y agoYeah, I guess it is google's attempt to make a go at twitter AND facebook. Unfortunately they are very likely to fail at both.