7 ms·

We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+. O

by mlinsey 15y ago

We'll see. I agree that Facebook Groups is much less powerful than Circles and much less fundamental to the core Facebook experience than Circles is with G+. On the other hand, Facebook Groups takes less effort to use - each person does not need to sort their friends, a small number of curators can organize the group. More importantly, it is clearer to the user just what is going on. I have been trying to talk to as many non-techie non-early-adopters as possible about Circles, and many get it and love it, but several don't really understand it. In particular, the asymmetry of circles is overlooked by a lot of people, even by some casual users who think they understand how Circles works. On Facebook, there is one authoritative list of who is in the group, and posts to the group stay in that group. On Google+, your circles are not my circles. I may have you in a "close friends" circle, you may have me in a big "co-workers" circle, or you might have all your friends in one circle. When I am browsing my "close friends" feed and see a post by you, I may guess wrong about the social context that you are sharing that message in, and make an inappropriate comment, not realizing who else received the message. (The way to determine on G+ who received a post is by noting and clicking on the gray "Public" or "Limited" in the upper right of the post) Maybe I am underestimating people, or maybe comments are just much less big a deal than posts, but I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents. If I had to make a prediction, I'd think that the ease-of-use and clarity of FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles. I could be wrong, so it'll be interesting to see what ordinary users prefer.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
There are a number of areas in G+ that seem like they're going to lead to highly-publicized mistakes, and the asymmetry of circles is certainly one of them. You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post). I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.
- DavidSJ 15y ago
  You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post). On private posts, the word "Limited" appears next to the post, on which you can click to see who it's visible to. It's not as obvious as it could be, but it's there.
  - waterlesscloud 15y ago
    Actually, you can only see icons for 21 of the people (and the total number) it was shared with in that case. Only the poster can see the whole list. There's a problem with even being able to see the 21, from the pov of the poster...
    - ben1040 15y ago
      If I am at a cocktail party, and something is said among a group of friends, I know I won't "out" anything if I only discuss it later with those who were originally within earshot. I appreciate how Google has brought this into the electronic realm. I do wish there was not a 21 person limit because I already see people sharing with much larger pools and you don't know who persons 22...n are who can also see the discussion.
      - tonfa 15y ago
        If there's more than 22 persons I assume it is somehow public.
- henrikschroder 15y ago
  But you can do the same mistake on Facebook, if I post a story to my wall and you comment on it, then you don't really know who gets to see it. The default sharing mode is "Friends of friends" if I remember it right, and that means my friends of friends can read your comment, and you can only see who my friends are, but not who my friends of friends are. On the other hand, I think most people are used to the fact that posting on Facebook is pretty public, and that the Circles feature might give people a false sense of privacy so they are more likely to make that mistake.
bad_user 15y ago
FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles FB Groups are more like mailing-lists. Useful of course, but I'm subscribed to 4 groups already, neither subscription being my choice, and I find the feature itself useless for Facebook.
nikcub 15y ago
when I first used Circles the first feature that came to my mind was the ability to make a circle public and to add other administrators to it and allow other people to 'follow' it, or add it to another circle I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy
ramanujan 15y ago
Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle. It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field. You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends. But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most. Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.
- guptaneil 15y ago
  Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts. That's exactly what they are: a visual interface to tags and tagged social graph nodes.
- sunchild 15y ago
  Google has always favored many-to-many "tags" over one-to-many "folders". Gmail brought that distinction to the mainstream. Circles are really just tags on the user object, in the end.
  - edanm 15y ago
    I'm not sure just how "mainstream" Gmail is. I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.
richardw 15y ago
FB for me (and it seems, for many) is an inherently private thing. I don't want groups outside of my real-life friends. That's the fundamental break here - I'm being followed (and following) much more widely, similar to Twitter. What Google has done is made Twitter for people who don't get why 140 characters is a feature. So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones. Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.
- discodave 15y ago
  In response to making our profiles public or not... I think a killer move from facebook would be a 'SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS' button for each post. It would be effectively like tweeting (individual posts) and would have critical mass pretty quickly due to fb's scale. Maybe it would be a nightmare building another twitter overnight or they would be pilloried for copying so blatantly. Additionally, it's occuring to me right now that a big issue would be deciding how to integrate those shouts into the newsfeed... oh wait by following people.
  - mattdeboard 15y ago
    Every post on FB is a "shout it from the rooftops" post, that's the whole point of Google+. Unless you meant 100% publicly available posts? That's the opposite of something Facebook ever would (or should) do. FB is a walled garden.
  - richardw 15y ago
    You'd need that button plus a change in the relationship model so non-friends could subscribe
lmarinho 15y ago
That problem is related to the fact that Circles can be both used as (1)a privacy group of people to which you push stuff and (2)a filter for content published from that same group. To avoid this kind of confusion maybe Google should separate those uses more clearly or just drop (2) altogether. Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.
ohyes 15y ago
Yes, circles could horribly magnify the ever embarrassing 'your mother rehashing the details of your childbirth in a Facebook post' problem.
joebadmo 15y ago
I agree that the asymmetry of Circles is a cognitive issue. Facebook groups actually work more like "Places"[1], which I think is a lot more intuitive, but I don't think FB makes the metaphor clear enough to leverage that intuitiveness. I also don't think FB takes the issue seriously enough. [1]: (I wrote more about this on my blog: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for-social-networking http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for...)
ajross 15y ago
I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading". I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.
zem 15y ago
yep, i'd love to see google+ groups as a feature orthogonal to circles

by mlinsey 15y ago

waterlesscloud 15y ago

There are a number of areas in G+ that seem like they're going to lead to highly-publicized mistakes, and the asymmetry of circles is certainly one of them. You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post). I also suspect an Weinergate style mis-post of something that was supposed to be private will occur fairly early on. Though to be fair, nothing is as easy to misdirect as a twitter DM.

DavidSJ 15y ago
You basically have no way to know who can see your comment on a post (outside of the fact that everyone can see it on a "public" post). On private posts, the word "Limited" appears next to the post, on which you can click to see who it's visible to. It's not as obvious as it could be, but it's there.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  Actually, you can only see icons for 21 of the people (and the total number) it was shared with in that case. Only the poster can see the whole list. There's a problem with even being able to see the 21, from the pov of the poster...
  - ben1040 15y ago
    If I am at a cocktail party, and something is said among a group of friends, I know I won't "out" anything if I only discuss it later with those who were originally within earshot. I appreciate how Google has brought this into the electronic realm. I do wish there was not a 21 person limit because I already see people sharing with much larger pools and you don't know who persons 22...n are who can also see the discussion.
    - tonfa 15y ago
      If there's more than 22 persons I assume it is somehow public.
henrikschroder 15y ago
But you can do the same mistake on Facebook, if I post a story to my wall and you comment on it, then you don't really know who gets to see it. The default sharing mode is "Friends of friends" if I remember it right, and that means my friends of friends can read your comment, and you can only see who my friends are, but not who my friends of friends are. On the other hand, I think most people are used to the fact that posting on Facebook is pretty public, and that the Circles feature might give people a false sense of privacy so they are more likely to make that mistake.

bad_user 15y ago

FB Groups will trump the power and flexibility of Circles FB Groups are more like mailing-lists. Useful of course, but I'm subscribed to 4 groups already, neither subscription being my choice, and I find the feature itself useless for Facebook.

nikcub 15y ago

when I first used Circles the first feature that came to my mind was the ability to make a circle public and to add other administrators to it and allow other people to 'follow' it, or add it to another circle I think starting with private circles and making them public is a better feature than fb groups, which are just annoying and spammy

ramanujan 15y ago

Circles are ok to set up at the beginning, but many people belong in more than one circle and it gets cognitively tiring to sort people appropriately into one-and-only-one circle. It's also cognitively tiring to work out the consequences of sending a message to a circle larger than what you might type into an email "to" field. You can work out the consequences of a broadcast announcement to the world/all your friends/your whole company. And you can work out the consequences of a private message to a few friends. But in between is hard, and kind of unnatural. Maybe people will learn, but I think most people will only use a few circles (Public/Private) at most. Random thought: the main reason for Circles is to reduce the negative consequences of sharing an identifiable message with someone inappropriate. If that could be predicted via machine learning, that'd be interesting.

guptaneil 15y ago
Why sort everybody into just one circle? Most of my contacts are sorted into multiple circles so that I have more fine-grained sharing control. G+ also makes it fairly easy to create new circles on the fly for when I want to share a message with an even more specific group. I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > I think of Circles more like tags that I can use to control visibility of my posts. That's exactly what they are: a visual interface to tags and tagged social graph nodes.
sunchild 15y ago
Google has always favored many-to-many "tags" over one-to-many "folders". Gmail brought that distinction to the mainstream. Circles are really just tags on the user object, in the end.
- edanm 15y ago
  I'm not sure just how "mainstream" Gmail is. I've always heard that only 5% of email users use Gmail, but I don't actually have a source. Does seem to be accurate based on my (non-techie) friends.

richardw 15y ago

FB for me (and it seems, for many) is an inherently private thing. I don't want groups outside of my real-life friends. That's the fundamental break here - I'm being followed (and following) much more widely, similar to Twitter. What Google has done is made Twitter for people who don't get why 140 characters is a feature. So: FB for my friends, G+ for the digerati and my real interest groups. Frankly, the latter has a better chance of improving search for me than my friendship groups, which is (or should be) the real goal. I've never seen a useful Facebook ad. I've seen many useful Google ones. Edit: The question is: can FB change the culture of how users use FB faster than G+ can capture "those who matter". Make it more public? There's a lot of resistance to making our profiles more public.

discodave 15y ago
In response to making our profiles public or not... I think a killer move from facebook would be a 'SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS' button for each post. It would be effectively like tweeting (individual posts) and would have critical mass pretty quickly due to fb's scale. Maybe it would be a nightmare building another twitter overnight or they would be pilloried for copying so blatantly. Additionally, it's occuring to me right now that a big issue would be deciding how to integrate those shouts into the newsfeed... oh wait by following people.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Every post on FB is a "shout it from the rooftops" post, that's the whole point of Google+. Unless you meant 100% publicly available posts? That's the opposite of something Facebook ever would (or should) do. FB is a walled garden.
- richardw 15y ago
  You'd need that button plus a change in the relationship model so non-friends could subscribe

lmarinho 15y ago

That problem is related to the fact that Circles can be both used as (1)a privacy group of people to which you push stuff and (2)a filter for content published from that same group. To avoid this kind of confusion maybe Google should separate those uses more clearly or just drop (2) altogether. Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.

ohyes 15y ago

Yes, circles could horribly magnify the ever embarrassing 'your mother rehashing the details of your childbirth in a Facebook post' problem.

joebadmo 15y ago

I agree that the asymmetry of Circles is a cognitive issue. Facebook groups actually work more like "Places"[1], which I think is a lot more intuitive, but I don't think FB makes the metaphor clear enough to leverage that intuitiveness. I also don't think FB takes the issue seriously enough. [1]: (I wrote more about this on my blog: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for-social-networking http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7072771434/a-new-metaphor-for...)

ajross 15y ago

I think this lack of clear social context for individual messages within Circles is going to lead to some serious privacy/sharing accidents Facebook already has those, though. There's a whole genre of comedy dedicated to exactly this problem already. Browse through /r/funny or /r/wtf for an hour and you'll find dozens of facebook screenshots, almost all of them basically a variant on "dumb commenter didn't know who was reading". I don't see how circles make that any worse. At least a the poster side of the problem they make it easier to be clear about who you want to read it.

zem 15y ago

yep, i'd love to see google+ groups as a feature orthogonal to circles