4 ms·

Introducing a feature like this would dilute Google+. As it stands, Google+ is a social network; it's primarily intended as an online place to connect to people

by eykanal 15y ago

Introducing a feature like this would dilute Google+. As it stands, Google+ is a social network; it's primarily intended as an online place to connect to people you know in real life. This feature would make it more of a broad "discussion center", where you talk about topics with people you don't know. That's a pretty fundamental paradigm shift. In fact, the only similarity between Google+ and this feature is that both involve groups of people. That's about it. I don't think implementing this would improve Google+ at all; it may be a good idea for another site, and the groups thing may be a good way to go about it, but not Google+.

gravity7 15y ago
Whether topical circles would enhance or dilute G+ is a matter of opinion of course. You might be right -- I tend to enjoy deep dives more than most. But I see no reason, either in functional integrity or in social practices, that topical circles would diminish G+. Those not interested would simply not use them -- this is true of FB groups and lists. It is incredibly difficult to achieve the network density and connectedness required to make a social network stick. Attention is in short supply -- witness Ning's failure to become the social network of interest groups. Perhaps it's not feasible for vertical and niche networks to match the success of the generic social nets. For this reason strikes me as in the ballpark to enable sustained topical conversations where the audience already exists, and where shared topical interests could augment individual profiles and deepen engagement.
saurik 15y ago
I am hard pressed to come up with anyone I know that uses Google+ the way you seem to say things currently "stand": nearly every user in the system has people like Zuckerburg, Gundotra, 50 Cent, or Scoble in their circles, and most of the activity seems to be around "more minor celebrities" with blogs like Geek Feminism. The model itself /is/ the Twitter model (circles as lists, reshare as retweet, comment as reply), with only one fundamental addition: "limit visibility of this tweet to these lists", which drastically helps specific use cases where otherwise people currently end up with multiple Twitter accounts (and then "awkward stuff" starts to happen due to how Twitter publicizes the resulting interaction with that tweet).

by eykanal 15y ago

gravity7 15y ago

Whether topical circles would enhance or dilute G+ is a matter of opinion of course. You might be right -- I tend to enjoy deep dives more than most. But I see no reason, either in functional integrity or in social practices, that topical circles would diminish G+. Those not interested would simply not use them -- this is true of FB groups and lists. It is incredibly difficult to achieve the network density and connectedness required to make a social network stick. Attention is in short supply -- witness Ning's failure to become the social network of interest groups. Perhaps it's not feasible for vertical and niche networks to match the success of the generic social nets. For this reason strikes me as in the ballpark to enable sustained topical conversations where the audience already exists, and where shared topical interests could augment individual profiles and deepen engagement.

saurik 15y ago

I am hard pressed to come up with anyone I know that uses Google+ the way you seem to say things currently "stand": nearly every user in the system has people like Zuckerburg, Gundotra, 50 Cent, or Scoble in their circles, and most of the activity seems to be around "more minor celebrities" with blogs like Geek Feminism. The model itself /is/ the Twitter model (circles as lists, reshare as retweet, comment as reply), with only one fundamental addition: "limit visibility of this tweet to these lists", which drastically helps specific use cases where otherwise people currently end up with multiple Twitter accounts (and then "awkward stuff" starts to happen due to how Twitter publicizes the resulting interaction with that tweet).