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A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property. * Personal work as circles do c

A suggested improvement to circles. . . Have 3 types - personal, group and owned group - defined by a simple editable property. * Personal work as circles do currently - i.e. its your way of organising your own contacts; no one else knows what personal circles you have or who's in them (including the members). * Group is a shared contact list - any member of that group has a copy of it, and has permissions to maintain it as if they'd created it. This would be useful if I wanted a group of people in my sport team / band, since when one of the band already in the group adds someone to this group, everyone in the band can then talk to them; and it's not up to me as the creator to do all the admin. * Owned Group - essentially the same as Group, but with additional security / more like FB's groups. I specify who's in the group and what access they have - i.e. if they're just a member, or if they can also administrate the group. This is more useful for application fan pages, where you want a mailing list of people to contact, but only want a few of the people in the group to be able to add / approve new members. With this model, it would be OK to have an option for non members to request access; then be added once approved. What do you guys think? JB

JohnLBevan 15y ago
One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know them). The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links). Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff" circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it, whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security). Again, I'd welcome your thoughts. Cheers, JB
- esrauch 15y ago
  That's interesting; it seems to me that if circles aren't actually intended to be used from a content driven perspective (eg person X is an amateur photographer and also posts about geocaching; they don't care who reads either but they don't want to spam people that are interested in only one or the other) then that is how circles would be (you 'tag' your own posts and people who follow you subscribe to just some of your tags). I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).
  - JohnLBevan 15y ago
    Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their friends would end up blocking them.
ubercore 15y ago
I see the thinking behind it, but it seems like it would be a mistake to make Circles any more conceptually complex than they are now. People are already making a decision about what circles to put things in, and what circles to share things with. I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.
- JohnLBevan 15y ago
  Good point, perhaps the naming of this functionality would need to be changed to avoid confusing users. . . Personally I'd prefer it all to be under circles, since to me it's all a way of organising collections of contacts, but I admit I think about these things differently to a user, and I'd still be happy if the terminology were different so long as the functionality was there.
alecperkins 15y ago
Too complicated. Circles are damn simple, just tags with a visual wrapper. It's important that they are. I think a lot of people are over thinking what Circles are or should be. It's probably because they're so centric to the product. But that's where their power comes from. Great ease in organizing your contacts to match your real-life associations, and having that be a central part to everything you do on the site, is what makes them useful the way Facebook's lists and groups, or Twitter's lists, are not really.
- JohnLBevan 15y ago
  Hey Alec, Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity. It looks like a few other people are having similar thoughts, so opinion on this area's certainly split: http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-low-return-wh http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-l... Thanks again, JB
  - alecperkins 15y ago
    Circles aren't private groups, though. They're asymmetric. I don't have to know what circles other people have put me in. My circles are for me, not for the people I've added to them. I get Garry's point, but I think he is also overthinking how they should be used, and missing the point that circles are mainly about sharing. I can't share tweets with just the people on a certain list, or a combination of lists and specific people. I agree there's a lot of potential value in the signals from public list-type structures; I even built a small app around that idea applied to Twitter lists: http://www.sabe.us http://www.sabe.us . For what they are intended to be though, as far as I can tell, it makes sense to keep circles as simple as possible. Google has done a good job of reducing the friction to organizing people and then using that organization for granular sharing. I do also strongly agree that G+ could use some sort of grouping functionality so people can organize around common interests, among other features. But I think this should be distinct from circles…maybe as "channels" or something.
kuahyeow 15y ago
Possible, but the last thing Google would want to do now would be to repeat Wave and Buzz and make it complicated and only enjoyable by sysadmins and bots. That would be definitely useful when Google Plus is available for Apps, though

JohnLBevan 15y ago

One other thought around circles. It would be cool if some kind of backwards circle functionality could be created. For example, I post a few links to my feed about tech stuff which only a handful of my friends are interested in, so I have two options: 1) post to just my "techies" circle so as not to spam my other friends 2) post to public so that anyone who's interested can see (including people who follow me but whom I haven't circled as I don't know them). The first option excludes my followers, the second spams my friends. I could create another circle of followers and message them and the techies, but that doesn't sit comfortably, especially as I don't know which of my posts caused those people to follow me (perhaps a music video I favourites on youtube caught their eye and now they're getting spammed with HN links). Having some way where I could create circles to publish stories to, but have others subscribe to those would be handy - I then publish to my "tech stuff" circle, and anyone who cares to subscribe to "JohnLBevan.TechStuff" sees it, whilst it's hidden from others (to prevent annoying them - not for security). Again, I'd welcome your thoughts. Cheers, JB

esrauch 15y ago
That's interesting; it seems to me that if circles aren't actually intended to be used from a content driven perspective (eg person X is an amateur photographer and also posts about geocaching; they don't care who reads either but they don't want to spam people that are interested in only one or the other) then that is how circles would be (you 'tag' your own posts and people who follow you subscribe to just some of your tags). I actually think that definitively shows that the intent of circles is just security (person X doesn't want his mom seeing his drinking photos) and that the possibility of sharing content based on what the reader is interested in really just comes for free with that (though in a roundabout and inconvenient way; the provider has to determine what content the reader is interested in).
- JohnLBevan 15y ago
  Thanks esrauch - agreed, they're just there for security at present, but have a lot of potential to be a lot more with just a few tweaks to existing functionality. One of the big differences of having circles which could be used as tags is these posts could also be shown to public and not to those in your circles other than those who've subscribed to the tag. I believe one reason Twitter's so popular is it allows you to post whatever you like and people choose to be interested - if someone tried to make the facebook status public and put the same stuff in there that they put on twitter lots of their friends would end up blocking them.

ubercore 15y ago

I see the thinking behind it, but it seems like it would be a mistake to make Circles any more conceptually complex than they are now. People are already making a decision about what circles to put things in, and what circles to share things with. I'd rather see a distinct "group" or "topic" feature.

JohnLBevan 15y ago
Good point, perhaps the naming of this functionality would need to be changed to avoid confusing users. . . Personally I'd prefer it all to be under circles, since to me it's all a way of organising collections of contacts, but I admit I think about these things differently to a user, and I'd still be happy if the terminology were different so long as the functionality was there.

alecperkins 15y ago

Too complicated. Circles are damn simple, just tags with a visual wrapper. It's important that they are. I think a lot of people are over thinking what Circles are or should be. It's probably because they're so centric to the product. But that's where their power comes from. Great ease in organizing your contacts to match your real-life associations, and having that be a central part to everything you do on the site, is what makes them useful the way Facebook's lists and groups, or Twitter's lists, are not really.

JohnLBevan 15y ago
Hey Alec, Thanks for your thoughts - I see your point, though think the functionality could be made available without increasing complexity. Circles would work in exactly the same way as they do now; there would just be an extra button available to those who wanted to use it to bring up a security panel (similar to google docs sharing functionality). If the default for a circle is for it to be a private group (i.e. as it is now), users only need to ignore the "share this group button" to avoid any complexity. It looks like a few other people are having similar thoughts, so opinion on this area's certainly split: http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-low-return-wh http://garry.posterous.com/google-circles-is-high-work-and-l... Thanks again, JB
- alecperkins 15y ago
  Circles aren't private groups, though. They're asymmetric. I don't have to know what circles other people have put me in. My circles are for me, not for the people I've added to them. I get Garry's point, but I think he is also overthinking how they should be used, and missing the point that circles are mainly about sharing. I can't share tweets with just the people on a certain list, or a combination of lists and specific people. I agree there's a lot of potential value in the signals from public list-type structures; I even built a small app around that idea applied to Twitter lists: http://www.sabe.us http://www.sabe.us . For what they are intended to be though, as far as I can tell, it makes sense to keep circles as simple as possible. Google has done a good job of reducing the friction to organizing people and then using that organization for granular sharing. I do also strongly agree that G+ could use some sort of grouping functionality so people can organize around common interests, among other features. But I think this should be distinct from circles…maybe as "channels" or something.

kuahyeow 15y ago

Possible, but the last thing Google would want to do now would be to repeat Wave and Buzz and make it complicated and only enjoyable by sysadmins and bots. That would be definitely useful when Google Plus is available for Apps, though