I 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

I 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.