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Google Circles is high work and low return
- RexRollman 15y agoIn my opinion, social networking has always been low return, regardless of where it occurs.
- jonathanjaeger 15y agoObviously your frame of reference is for a very limited use case. Three examples of social networking working in the last couple weeks (just from my limited perspective): 1. My mom rediscovering someone she hadn't seen in over 20 years through Facebook. 2. Two musicians chatting on each others' music profiles and figuring out how to collaborate on music online. 3. An engineering student from Africa reaching out to me to comment on his project. Given Garry Tan's work at Posterous, there is some vested interest in the space, but at the same time I don't think his claims are any less valid. I haven't tried Google+ yet, so I don't know if I agree or not.
- nollidge 15y agoI fail to see how Circles is "high work". You make a simple decision about which circle(s) to put someone in. It's not multi-variable calculus.
- stevenleeg 15y agoEspecially since this decision is required to be made when you first "follow" someone. It's not like Facebook where there's a small box for you to choose a list after you've already accepted a friend request.
- skarayan 15y agoAgreed, also it is very easy since most of my friends are already in my GMail contacts. All I have to do is drag and drop.
- sliverstorm 15y agoIt's not multi-variable calculus Obviously you're doing it wrong.
- cbs 15y agoIf we rotate this circle around the X-axis, how many people did you just accidentally send a picture of your dick?
- garry 15y agoThink about it in terms of number of mouse clicks to model real-life behavior. To be able to model n people in a system, Circles / Lists require n people making n connections, so n^2 actions. Chances are you won't even get there, so it'll be an incomplete and underused graph. For Groups, where there's a shared space, it's only n actions. Each person has to be added once.
- groby_b 15y agoFalse math. Each person takes N actions. Only the sum total across M people is NxM. Yes, it would be easier if you could share circles, but it's by no means hard work.
- garry 15y agoWhat is M? In order for n people to connect to n-1 other people (n-1 number of additions of people to circles), it approximates to n*n, or n^2.
- groby_b 15y agoUnless you set up all the circles all your friends use, you don't care. A single person will only have n-1 actions for n friends. That's why I said the SUM total is MxN
- munaf 15y agoYou make many decisions if you have a high number of friends. And you do so every time you post something. It can get hairy, and it already has for me (at only 60 friends). "Why didn't Jim comment on this yet? I posted it to my Friends circle and it's totally his kind of thing. Oh, he's in Coworkers but I forgot to put him under Friends too." That's really my biggest problem with Circles in their current form. They're being themed as analogs to how we group people in real life, but in reality we're still network administrators in that we apply permissions to things that we only want certain groups to see. Admins have netgroups (netgroup = users and/or groups) whereas we have no form of inheritance/hierarchy/overlap to make things easy to remember. That said - I love Circles as an interface/vocabulary paradigm more than lists/groups, and the UI is very well-executed.
- cheez 15y agoIf Facebook has taught us anything, there are the following classes of "friends": * People I don't really know * People I tell about the pimples on my butt or the argument I had with my wife * Work-related people I talk to on a regular basis * Hobby-related people I talk to on a regular basis Most people have 900 in the first category and maybe a few dozen in the others. That being said, the "reciprocating circle addition" UI is brilliant, I love it.
- peterzakin 15y agoIt would probably be too much work if "circling" were done after following a person, but since circling is merely part of the process of following someone, it doesn't seem like that much of a burden.
- wisty 15y agoThat's why Google+ may give Facebook a run for its money. It's a lot of work to go back and fix stuff. Starting afresh seems a lot easier. Who's trashed a personal code base because they couldn't be bothered doing a cleanup, and decided to re-write from scratch?
- peterzakin 15y agoBegs the question: are circles valuable? I think that people are actually taking the time to organize their circles. You almost have to be a google+ anarchist to not organize your circles. But are people actually using circles? The only time that I use circles is when i want to filter my stream, which is useful, though not reason to call google+ a game changer. Now, what will be interesting to see is how i will use circles when i start uploading photos to google+. If i only share with the few people i'm putting in my friends circle, that could be damaging to facebook. That could be a game-changer. Also, fwiw, I'm using Google+ publicly right now, kind of like a long-form twitter.
- wisty 15y agoI'd say so, as they allow a lot more styles of engagement. Want to use google+ as twitter? Use circles. Tweet out to the 1,000 people in your "tech enthusiast" circle. Want to share photos with close friends? Use circles. Google+ can be lots of things to lots of different people, without spoiling it for everything. But then, I'm an optimist. Maybe it will all be a wash. Who knows?
- megaman821 15y agoIf you have a 1,000 people in your tech enthusiast circle, you put them there. That is a lot of work compared to people putting themselves there. A lot of the famous people on Google+ with thousands of followers post everything publicly, not even using circles.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoIt's the dragging icons around via mouse that gets tedious. Give us a command line tool for that and we're golden. :D
- ignifero 15y agoI agree with that and think they need to implement an obvious extension: shared circles.
- pettazz 15y agoAs in: an option when creating a new circle as to whether or not it's public?
- seri 15y agoAs in: I have a Highschool circle and add my highschool classmates in it. I can then share it to all my classmates so they don't have to do the same work again. Or: I have a circle containing all great hackers. I then post the link to it here on Hacker News so everybody can have that whole circle with a single click.
- otisfunkmeyer 15y agothat is so genius.
- garry 15y agoShared circles -- this makes sense to me. I wouldn't be surprised if Google already had this coming down the pipe.
- brianb722 15y agoThere is a circle jerk joke in here somewhere I know it.
- ceejayoz 15y agoNested circles would be nice, too. I'd like to be able to have an "everyone" circle, put "acquaintances" in it, and put "work" in "acquaintances".
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoThere is already an "everyone" circle, it's called public post.
- pettazz 15y agoThis guy seems to be missing the entire point of Circles. So you can determine what stuff you post goes out to what people. If I post a link that I don't want my mom to see, I won't include the Family circle in it. That's a pretty high return for me.
- garry 15y agoI'm pretty sure I'd prefer to use a private family group for this. If my mom wants to post something to the group, I will have already created it and she won't have to re-make the circle. Can you even imagine having your mom make circles?
- brianb722 15y agoMaking circles is way more intuitive than Facebook groups or Twitter lists, so yes, I could see my parents being able to make a Google+ circle.
- 51Cards 15y agoMy Mom has already made circles and found the drag and drop feature to be dead easy. She loves it.
- garry 15y agoYou're right, the Google drag-and-drop thing works pretty well and is quite innovative. That's certainly a direct way for them to mitigate the circle-creation problem. Arguably that's actually a critical piece of making Google+ work even though Circles is an n^2 operation.
- 51Cards 15y agoI don't disagree that setup is a bit more work, but I think the pay-off for the individual user is very high. On top of that I expect you'll see Google introducing "Groups" as well very soon... public subscription groups that work better for a "Follow my company" type of thing. Not sure how they will implement that but I do think it is also a needed structure. Personally though I would take the Circles concept even as it stands now any day over Facebook's method of social management. I've already found myself sharing far more on G+ (despite the fact only a small part of my social graph is there yet) just because I'm not worried that Aunt Mabel will find this offensive, or I'll have to field questions from Uncle Earl about what that tech link meant.
- aarlo 15y agoLow social return. High personal return.
- stevenleeg 15y agoI think it's wrong for the author to compare the functionality of G+ circles with Facebook's group feature, as the two are not the same. Circles are more directly comparable with Facebook's "lists" feature, which can also be said to have a high amount of work (significantly more than G+'s circles, in my opinion) for a low amount of "return".
- garry 15y agoNobody uses Facebook lists. That's the main reason I didn't bother mentioning it.
- seabee 15y agoPerhaps your next post should argue that Facebook's one-to-one video calling is a better mode of communication than Google+ group text discussion (or vice versa). You would even have strengthened your argument if you noted how Facebook lists were underused compared to Groups, and extrapolate it to Circles.
- pkamb 15y agoFacebook used to do with "Lists" the same thing Google+ is doing with circles. The option to add someone to a list/circle right after friending them. They removed it 6+ months ago... presumably because no one took the time to add their friends to lists. It's highly relevant to the article.
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- dkarl 15y agoSo my Circles won't grow organically out of my control? Good. That's the point. Don't use the screwdriver to hammer nails.
- fab13n 15y agoBeing able to control your connections is a good thing, and eventually becomes very important. But enabling a "don't make me think" approach by default would lower the barrier to entry. 99% of non-geeks hate to consciously categorize stuff in general, and people in particular. That being said, this could be easily fixed: add a special "all my contacts" circle which contains everyone I've ever added: people can be in the all-my-contacts circle without being into any other normal circles, but as soon as they're in a normal circle they also go into all-my-contacts. Then I can opt into circle categorization when it becomes necessary, rather than before I've decided whether G+ is nerdier and more cumbersome to use than FB.
- pieter 15y ago> But enabling a "don't make me think" approach by default would lower the barrier to entry. Isn't that Buzz did and everyone found creepy?
- fab13n 15y agoThe problem with buzz was that it put people in your list without asking you first. Here I'm just talking about putting everyone you add in the same bucket, until you (maybe) realize that you want several distinct buckets. That would be Facebook-like, not Buzz-like. Adding people in a list doesn't count as making people think, because the targeted audience has already been trained to this by Facebook.
- ignifero 15y agoI disagree. I think asking people to organize their friends gives a very personal touch, and the interface is so intuitive it's hard to be confused. I think people will actually like how they can have control their friends and will fiddle about with it. It would be interesting for google to release statistics on how much time people spend organizing their circles.
- kidmenot 15y agoMe, I really love this "Circles" feature. How I organize my contacts is (and should be) entirely up to me. Others can't see my groups? It can't get any better than that, and I really mean it. But hey, of course I might be wrong.
- brianb722 15y agoExactly. I don't want the people I was forced to add out of workplace social norms to know they're in a "Work - Others" group that gets to hardly see anything I do. These are MY social circles, why should they have to be relevant to anyone other than me.
- docgnome 15y agoYou know, it didn't dawn on me until just now where the name circles come from.
- mdesq 15y agoCircles seems like the Google+ equivalent of labels in Gmail or tags in Reader. You can easily tag a thread or user with one or more descriptive labels. I don't find that a lot of work. Facebook, in comparison (last time I checked), makes you go to the group to add/remove people. Major pain to manage groups in FB.
- cbs 15y agoI understand the criticism and while G+ may be able to benefit from something like public circles, I think the post misses the core concept that circles are my cataloging of the people I know. Nobody else has shares or even understands the weight of edges on my social graph. It looks like google's goal is to give user's ownership over their circles rather than making them a shared resource, it gives the user ultimate control over who sees what they post. A shared group relies on the assumption that all the members' social connections create the same graph such that that group X is good for their collective Xing purposes. Other than tight-nit cliques that doesn't work well. Even then, once one person wants a "group X minus Y" or another wants "group X plus Z" the utility of the group is severely diminished. Shared control also has downsides, for example I don't need people who have access to my drunk pictures able to add people to the drunk picture viewer's list. While there are ways of sharing the pictures out-of-band that is a risk and different than the self-censoring that could follow an unwelcome addition to a circle.
- brown9-2 15y agoThere's a simple fix to this, isn't there? Add a user option to define a default group to place new contacts into. I think a part of the perceived "high work" is treating what G+ would like you to think of as "your friends" as "random people I want to follow" a la Twitter.
- jiaaro 15y agothis is wrong... for many people, this is fun and worth while in it's own right. Organizing your friends into groups could be a facebook app (so in otherwords, people would do it without any other reason than just to do it and maybe share it)
- msluyter 15y agoThe author doesn't seem to be taking into account the fact that the "work" involved is front-loaded at the moment, because everyone's joining G+ simultaneously. Once a certain equilibrium is reached, our circles won't change that rapidly over time and the work will (should?) be minimal.
- kuahyeow 15y agoGoogle circles was based on that real social network paper by Paul Adams. In the real world, there aren't 1000 "friends" to categorise. The oft-quoted figure of 150 friends come to mind. Not really high work to move 150 friends. It matches your mental model so well, that it's hard not to move people into groups
- InclinedPlane 15y agoExactly. You have family and very close friends who might as well be family, but beyond that you typically have groups of friends in some particular context. Friends through work, friends from school, friends through a particular hobby, professional acquintances, etc, etc. Often times it's not appropriate to dump all of these people into one big bucket, to imagine that the level of intimacy you share with a friend you would donate an organ to and some one you like to spend time with at work should be even remotely the same. As social networking sites become mature it's critical that they engage the full spectrum of communication, not merely the lowest common denominator that's suitable or meaningful to all of your extended acquintances.
- pnathan 15y agoI dunno, I was able to follow some leaders in tech with only a few clicks and taps on the keyboard. /not a social media power user.
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- smazero 15y agoMinor nitpick, but I'm not also not sure I buy the argument that a group that any member can add other members to, automatically and always gets better over time. I don't have any data one way or another, but it seems entirely plausible to me that a group could morph and change with new additions until it becomes something you don't want to be a member of any more. But basically this comes down to what other people have already noted: Google+ Circles != Facebook Groups
- stretchwithme 15y agoTo help others discover new people, Google could simply allow you to make some of your lists public.
- Joakal 15y agoI haven't got a G+ account, but is G+ circle grouped friends data exportable? It seems like a form of technical debt otherwise as n of friends approach infinity.
- Hisoka 15y agoForget Circles. It's all about showcasing our narcissism and ego. Where can people see our long friend list? Where can they see our favorite quotations? Our favorite movies? Our huge photo album collection with all our social events and vacations? Where can they see our "Notes"? Where can they see the witty comments we've made on other status messages?
- phamilton 15y agoI think the big picture people are missing is that the average facebook and twitter user has put so many hours into their account. Adding friends. Following people. It's been a cumulative process over the last 5 years. Trying to cram that into a week is clearly going to seem overwhelming. What is most impressive is that many (myself included) find Google+ and Circles to be quite friction free.
- al-king 15y agoI don't think he gets what makes Circles good. Their privacy and asymmetry is exactly why I like them. You don't want other people knowing 'how you classify' them, and it doesn't matter to them, really, unless they're being neurotic. Circles is an unobtrusive way to show the people you want precisely the things you want them to see; this would become an awkward tug-of-war if they had to agree on what you did. EDIT: After a little consideration, being able to designate Circles as public does seem reasonable, though. I follow games industry, comics, and Uni club people and have them in groups saying as much. I'd feel perfectly comfortable publishing those for people who're interested, and would like to find those people.
- jgalvez 15y agoI'm getting tired of self-righteous posts about how the way Circles works is a problem. It might be a problem for you, but it might be a feature for others. It's exactly what I want, to be honest. If that doesn't work for you, stick to Facebook and Twitter.