tl;dr for the below: If it's too much work with their UI, it's a UI problem. > The problem is that it’s just too much work. I’ve long since given up trying to

tl;dr for the below: If it's too much work with their UI, it's a UI problem. > The problem is that it’s just too much work. I’ve long since given up trying to maintain my Circles, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Circles also lost its core utility for me. After I put about 100 people into different buckets I couldn’t remember who I put where, and what I was supposed to share with which Circle. So I just gave up and started sharing everything publicly. > It doesn’t matter how great and fun an experience is, good UI design cannot fix a broken solution. I actually think Google Circles' problem is poor UI design, not a broken solution. Lists are a great way to manage things, but you need to have powerful operations on top of lists. I said it when they came out that I was disappointed with their lack of a Venn-diagram interface where I can define sets of people in terms of other sets and their operations. (Why then "circles" and not "groups"?) On-the-fly one-time-use circles would have been nice to have, too. And they didn't have an API for a long time so it's not like someone could straightforwardly go implement such things in a third-party app. (I haven't been following the API so I don't know if someone could do this now, but I'm pretty sure their first version of the API didn't even allow POST requests--awful developer UI.) On a second note, I think good UI can cover up a broken solution. Look at the mobile world with "everything-is-an-app" largely thanks to the iPhone.