I've seen multiple variations of similar requests. It seems that there's two separate problems that need to be addressed. There's the broadcasters problem where people want to broadcast information only to select groups of people. Facebook has taken a stab at this, Google+ has done it much better, and the concept is merely Public/Private for Twitter.
Then there's the subscriber problem where people want to read relevant information on a specific topic. This problem only seems to exist when connections only need to go in one direction, i.e. following. Here users want to be able to view posts on specific subjects by those with "celebrity" type persona's. Twitter solves this (IMO, poorly) with the use of hashtags and multiple accounts. The hashtags don't solve this problem completely because you can't subscribe to a specific user's hashtag. I don't personally care that @pydanny is drunk at a wedding with Audrey, but I'm super interested in his DjangoCon talk. I also don't care about Joe Schmoe learned the power of decorators in his #django views.
To me, tags don't seem like the right approach because of the reasons above. I personally like the concept of "Channels". Users can create any number of channels for whatever they want to post about. When you are adding a user to your circle, you can select which channels you'd like to subscribe to. Then when they post they can select which channel the post is relevant to. Now, some of you may say: Whats the difference between this and tagging? Well, the distinguishing factor is that you need to create channels prior to posting to them. It forces users to categorize their subjects consistently, and it allows subscribers specific choices on what they'd like to see.
I think the issue could be easily solved by adding alternate (additional?) personalities to a profile. Then, when posting, you'd add "Markus Persson, Minecraft developer", remove "Markus Persson, default" and voila. No change to circles required, UI could be kept simple and clean, etc. I guess channels are basically the same thing, but depersonalized, and google has/wants to become people-oriented with G+, so name should matter to them.
Or let people attach search terms to people in circles.
This is an awesome analysis. I think the best thing to come out of Google+ is the clarification of kinds of digital social interactions and how we might tackle those in the (short-term) future. Maybe even Facebook or Google will iterate and offer robust solutions here.
It sounds to me like "channels" are defined by the poster, but "public group" (which I don't see you talking about anywhere on this discussion) would be taken from a global namespace. The way I choose to carve up reality is going to be slightly different from someone else's, and that difference is important.
(...and, in fact, the way I'm now reading the original poster's concept of "public circles" also seems like it is defined per-poster; but the mechanism on Flickr for "public groups" that mc32 is talking about is quite different: it requires a bunch of shared coordination over what that group means.)
(...and now I've skimmed through a bunch of your history on HN, and found that you talk about "public circles" occasionally, but do not mention "public groups", so I'm just confused. You do, however, compare them to Facebook Groups, which to me have that same global namespace problem. It is useful and important that my public circle might be called "Android Bytecode Manipulation" whereas someone else's might be called "General Instruction Manipulation", as these aren't even hierarchically related; "Sneaky Programming Hi-jinx" from someone else may be relevant and interesting to you as well; once you force things to be maintained in a public namespace it becomes a lot less personal and a lot less social in the particular "sharing is what it means to you" way that Google+ is all about.)
Read more carefully. I was not the one to compare it with Facebook Groups. We're both talking about the exact same concept. The user says, "These are groups of people that I want to send information to" and anyone who wants can add themselves to those groups.
Usability case #1: Guido creates a 'python' circle for his occasional musings, marks it as public soapbox and done. He can't add but can invite. Starts posting and all his followers get the tidbits. Twitter is dead.
Usability case #2: Guido creates a 'python' soapbox, which is a reference to his blogger account. Starts posting from G+ and automatically updates blogger where all his followers get the tidbits. Twitter is dead. Also posterous and wordpress.
The issue is that circles need configuration themselves. They serve two purposes: targeted sending and receiving from people. The receiving bit needs the ability to add filtering.
Facebook has this same issue. I want to get updates from my "friends" but I don't want everything they send. Just whatever is relevant to the context I added them for in the first place.
He should just stick to a reddit subgroup or facebook or twitter or something. I kinda like the privacy and simplicity of circles. And in this realm there is no one size fits all. Google+ can be more small, closed group oriented, someone else can fill your broadcasting desires. Emphasis on everything is emphasis on nothing, and google circles fills a void between email and broadcast (twittter/FB feed) that I love. Keep it that way.
Agreed, the whole point of something like Twitter is to have a default public broadcast medium for short messages. Why not just use it for that and leave Google+'s circles to what they do (best)?
Because the presence of public circles (channels, topics, columns) need in no way dilute the current functionality of (private) circles.
G+ is where the audience is at, so that's where Notch would like to broadcast. Obviously a large number of fans are already following him for the purpose of getting this specific information, not noise on other subjects. If we don't enable that category of user, they're going to depart for greener pastures completely (rather than alienate their fans with a poor experience).
I want them both. And a blog. And something like Twitter but with better ability to follow a conversation (something like the way identi.ca works).
I have only briefly played with Google+, but with some tweaks and some enhancements to the publishing aspect of one's outgoing stream of posts and some way to follow subsets of people's public posts (maybe integrate with Blogger?), I think they could make a serious run at ALL current services that are based on organizing and presenting user-generated content.
That would be a very ambitious project, though. I wonder if Google has the cojones for something that big?
There's dozens of existing ways to have public posts that people can subscribe to (twitter, blogs, mailing lists, etc). In contrast there's not many places that let you share information the way Circles does. Kinda lame that as soon as people jump on Circles, they just want a rehash of the same features you can find anywhere else.
I'm not so sure you get it. Yes.. you can subscribe to a lot of different mediums. But unless I use one medium for each audience, there will be overlap.
For instance.. barrybe may be in a "Friends" circle and a "Programmers" circle. In a programmer to programmer relationship, I only want to hear relevant topics. As a friend though.. I may want to be subjected to your waves of pictures highlighting your 2nd childs 1st steps. There's no way to keep the kids crap out of my "Programmer" stream.
The same is true for your blog. Unless I can subscribe to particular tags, I can't keep our interaction focused. I may get a rant, a story, an educational post.. it could be anything.
So the next best thing is organize all content by topic (for me). And here we have it.. "Hacker News". Except.. this environment is far less personal and far more intimidating.
Google definitely needs to do something about the public/private problem. Earlier today I blogged about why I think Google+ sharing is not revolutionary: http://www.ajennings.net/blog/?p=41
Google+ doesn't support the broadcast/subscribe model that well, and although it helps posters keep stuff private when they want, it ultimately leaves the decision of how much information is too much or too little about some person up to the sharer, when it should be dictated by the recipient.
> Google+ doesn't support the broadcast/subscribe model that well, and although it helps posters keep stuff private when they want, it ultimately leaves the decision of how much information is too much or too little about some person up to the sharer, when it should be dictated by the recipient.
Social Networks are not supposed to be the same as a broadcast medium. What is being discussed in this thread is how to bridge the gap, but to suggest that information flow "should be dictated by the recipient" instead of permitting fine-grained sharing misses the entire point of Google+'s approach to sharing.
Allowing the recipient to dictate information flow is excellent for self-promotion, marketing, and news broadcast. It doesn't make sense for how people interact with friends, family, drinking buddies, and colleagues.
Circles work when I know what kind of posts my friends like and when they know what I like, but what about when we don't know what each other likes?
I want to share my posts with all my friends and have them decide what they want to see. I want to tag my posts or have my friends tag my posts. Then, they can follow my posts with certain tags or hide them from their stream. I want to see what they post in certain circles and join or subscribe. It's like twitter lists, but instead of lists of people, it would have a list of posts.
Isn't that what the "Following" Circle is for? People who care about Minecraft add him to that Circle? Maybe I misunderstood the purpose of that Circle.
The problem is that people who might want to follow might want to follow about different topics.
For instance people want to follow him because they are interested in minecraft, or because they are interested in game progamming. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow John Baez because they are interested in his math/physics blog or because they are interested in Project Azimuth. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow Randal Schwartz because of his Perl stuff, or karaoke. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
People might want to follow Matt Cutts because of interest in SEO or exercise. The overlap between those groups is not that large.
All of the above might be comfortable with some personal stuff being public. But people who want to see their personal stuff has a fairly small overlap with what they have.
In short all of the problems that circles try to solve for private stuff exist for content people are willing to have be public. The simple public/following labels don't address the need.
He wants a circle that he doesn't have to maintain, which the interested audience "subscribe" to. He can then post Minecraft updates to this. He wouldn't know who they are (even if they add him to a circle, he wouldn't know if they are interested in Minecraft and that would be a lot of work for a big circle) to add them himself.
I want this too, not necessarily as proposed, but at least the use case supported, somehow.
No, Notch posts frequently about Minecraft. So everyone who follows him but don't care about Minecraft will get those posts. That's the problem. The only solution now is for him to not post Minecraft related material to Public, but to a particular circle, say "Minecraft" which, due to how Circles work now, he has to bear 100% of the effort to maintain the people in it, which is not feasible (as I described above).
I bet there are thousands of people that want the voting scores on comments in HN to come back but that wont bring them back. Designing software is not a popularity contest.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford
Well, people most of the time fail to see that the universe does not turn around them. What percentage of users want it ?
Minorities. Celebrities and mostly people who refer to a big audience of people.
But what will happen if Google will keep adding everything that will turn out useful for someone ? Those people who wanted to use those features will again say that Google+ is geeky.
Twitter has only one way follow, nothing more, facebook has either only one way follow (for pages) or the whole clutter (All you network).
Shut up and stop trying to make the world fit you, try to fit in yourself
Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Seacrest can't join G+ until they fix this. Well, they could, but they couldn't use it for personal stuff. Try sorting through ~5 million notifications looking for the thousand or so that you actually know.
But that ruins the idea of a Circle. If I can join into a circle, the entire idea of a circle as it relates to privacy becomes ambiguous and you lose the clear distinction that probably already isn't terribly clear among more novice users.
There's a way to fix this, but it's not via public circles. There are lots of good ideas out there about how to use tagging, filtering, sparks or combinations of the three to provide a subreddit-esque layer on top of Google+ that would enable more content and options for users while still allowing my Mom to safely post her pictures to her Family circle without worrying about "Public circles".
The key idea of a circle is that I have different kinds of content that I want to send to different audiences.
Google+ currently handles that fact when it comes to private content. It does not handle that fact with public content.
I agree that the whole public/private distinction is important to keep clear. But there are a lot of ways to do this. For instance make public circles blue when you add them, and private ones green. And add a tooltip to make it clear what the colors mean.
In short, I don't buy the idea that "grandma can't understand this" as a reason to deny a feature that a lot of people want. And that matters disproportionately to the top content producers.
In short, I don't buy the idea that "grandma can't understand this" as a reason to deny a feature that a lot of people want.
Along those lines, what people are asking for here is pretty much the ability to make Google+ a bit more like Twitter.
From conversations with grandma and her ilk, grandma doesn't get Twitter, either, so I don't think you're losing very much.
Google+ seems to be positioning itself as the Android to Facebook's iPhone, for people that want more control and don't mind jumping through a few more hoops as long as they have it. I think they've still got some complexity to burn, especially if they continue to make the UI as easy to comprehend as it's been thus far.
My comment was not at all that "grandma can't understand this". I mean that the concept of Circles needs to either evolve to where it has almost a different meaning altogether AND/OR that there are better mechanisms for targetting content than circles. How many damn Circles am I going to end up with (politics, democrats, hacker, programmers, lgbt and allies, etc plus family, friends, coworkers) plus I now have circles that are used for privacy directionality and others used for announcements. But what about announcements I want to share, but just with my family?
Circles are about privacy, I think that this tareted publishing is a categorically different idea and that Google doesn't even need to take the risk of muddling the Circles disinctions.
Besides, I'm convinced a tagging system (cross reference links with other social networking sites, "read" the web pages and combine it with Prediction API, etc) or self-tagging or sharing within Sparks (like subreddits [if you've used them to understand how much they can change the experience of a social networking site], or even better because the conversation is smaller and more intimate)
I feel like shoving it into Circles is brash and missing a good opportunity.
They could add google groups to the google+ environment.
Create a minecraft group with only the manager being able to post there but that anyone can see and you have what he wants.
Create a minecraft group with open/moderated subscribership and you have a typical forum.
Create a minecraft group with private subscription and you have your private channel.
For this groups should be both a persona and a circle. The group persona is who you follow to read, the group circle is who will have access to the information (like in the google groups).
Now it recognises the groups and gets the images from there if you add one, but there's no place in the group to add "accept posts from google+", and no place in google+ to "read from the groups I'm subscribed".
We could just give them a name other than "Circle", like "Public Topics", "Broadcast Channels", or "Columns". Personally though I don't think it is confusing to have Public and Private circles.
They're completely different concepts though. One is "I don't want these people to be able to see this". The other is "I want to publish this at people who are interested".
When I publish a post via my +blog, and it's about my piece of software, I want to publish it to my project followers, but I don't necessarily want to target it at my family. Does that mean I want to hide it from my family? Not necessarily.
Public circles are different than private circles, but I don't find the difference disconcerting. Both are "I am publishing" but in private circles (text, email, conversation) "I indicate who is my audience" and public circles (twitter, blog, presentation) "The audience is self-selecting". Allowing the audience to merely filter by author is not sufficient.
But wait. With your blog now, either your family gets an update (maybe via an RSS feed) or they check it periodically. The same would be true of a public circle. Either they join the public circle an get an update when you post or they can check the content of the public circle whenever they want (assuming you don't need to join the circle to see its content).
Sparks looks like the preemptive avenue for sponsored content. Reminds me of an AOL suggested content sinkhole. It's an insult, really. At least back when people were dialing up there wasn't much in the form of federated content so it was in AOL's interest to prime the customer with bland reading matter to keep them interested. This Sparks thing, I dunno.
I think at this point since they have all the early adopters already locked in and providing feedback, they should think of suspending any new signups until they have the circle matrix figured out, like Twitter did.
That would be great. It seems like Google has the brainpower to figure out a way to use up and down votes to target ads better as well. I would love to see ads based on things that I am actually interested in.
Isn't it essentially just Google Alerts, as if a search term with "only the best results" "as it happens" "deliver to Google Reader" set, except instead of to reader, to the sparks page?
I posted the same request. I run a Facebook page for a small special-interest community with a few hundred members. Members can meet each other, share relevant info, and there's some people with powers to moderate the inevitable borderline-commercial crap that pops up rarely. G+ doesn't have this.
Maybe Google Groups + G+ can have babies and make a superior opt-in, shared-community solution to Facebook pages.
The thing is, from Google's marketing perspective, this is also similar to LinkedIn and .. well .. it would just look way too much like "more of the same" for them to push it hard at launch. But the demand's clearly there, I think we'll see it added.
What part of this nonsense hasn't been solved 10 times better by bulletin board systems and usenet groups? A stream of 1000 users is a stream of garbage.
Then there's the subscriber problem where people want to read relevant information on a specific topic. This problem only seems to exist when connections only need to go in one direction, i.e. following. Here users want to be able to view posts on specific subjects by those with "celebrity" type persona's. Twitter solves this (IMO, poorly) with the use of hashtags and multiple accounts. The hashtags don't solve this problem completely because you can't subscribe to a specific user's hashtag. I don't personally care that @pydanny is drunk at a wedding with Audrey, but I'm super interested in his DjangoCon talk. I also don't care about Joe Schmoe learned the power of decorators in his #django views.
To me, tags don't seem like the right approach because of the reasons above. I personally like the concept of "Channels". Users can create any number of channels for whatever they want to post about. When you are adding a user to your circle, you can select which channels you'd like to subscribe to. Then when they post they can select which channel the post is relevant to. Now, some of you may say: Whats the difference between this and tagging? Well, the distinguishing factor is that you need to create channels prior to posting to them. It forces users to categorize their subjects consistently, and it allows subscribers specific choices on what they'd like to see.