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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

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.

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.