So I'm usually one of the folks defending google+ against the haters (usually along the lines of it's dead/no it's not arguments)...
But this particular issue shits me no end. It's ridiculous to give us this way of sorting people into circles without that actually giving us any control at all besides (and only recently) what appears on our stream.
Actually making circles MEAN SOMETHING - should have come before they integrated them into every single other product offering. The front page of youtube now - for me is full of crap that I have no interest in at all.
Just because I've circled someone doesn't mean I want their presence injected into every aspect of my online endeavour. It's annoying as hell. We thought it was safe to circle people because we thought the whole point of circles was the control it gave us.
It's astonishing how google is missing it's own goddamn point - the one we all thought it was trying to make with this product.
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Edit:
I should add that I am still willing to say the positives outweigh the negatives at this stage - the chats I'm having on G+ are simply awesome. But fixing this should be their number 1 priority if they don't want folks like me to ditch it.
I actually dropped Google+ altogether because of "plus pollution" -- after dropping a few lines and asking for a way to opt out of the crappage. I can't for the life of me see why anybody would want the main service of another web site crowded out by social garbage
Most of my circles of friends and acquaintances (in real-life terms as well as the Google-branded version) intersect with me in areas other than things like YouTube video interests and so on. Should I share political leanings and hobby interests with everybody who, say, develops software on the same platform I do? If that's the case, then I missed the memo.
Well, Facebook does the same from a different angle, they just didn't start out with such a large portfolio that they now inject social in - they started with social and now try to inject it into anything they can get their hands on.
The basic hypothesis is: People are social, social drives usage, so let's put it into everything. The problem is: We already have social in everything, without their help, just not in a way that drives their usage.
But then again - the best thing about Google+ is getting into chats with interesting folk you don't already know. That's it's ENTIRE selling point for me right now. Most people share crap (like everywhere else) - but it can sometimes spark the awesome chats... and the chats are everything.
So being really conservative in who you circle defeats the entire point of using the service as far as I am concerned. Cause let's face it - most people aren't using it to connect to people they know. Facebook's features are far to advanced for people to switch for that reason.
This appears to be caused by internal confusion about what circles are. Some people think that "has in a circle" means "is friends with". But Circles are a classification system, like tags - you put people in a circle to reflect some fact about them, and those tags could mean anything from "close friends" to "people I know from this context" to "people I hate".
The author mentions having a "people I don't actually know" circle. The fact that people are using Circles this way means that it's not okay to use "is in any circle" blindly, for any purpose. But that's what Google did with GChat. Oops.
To choose who is in your contact list, log into G+, and hit the little arrow menu next to the chat list. Inside 'Privacy Settings' you can restrict which circles appear in your chat list.
I had to look several times, and mis-click on other things wondering if they're what you meant, before I realized that that light-grey-on-white arrow menu was there.
But this particular issue shits me no end. It's ridiculous to give us this way of sorting people into circles without that actually giving us any control at all besides (and only recently) what appears on our stream.
Actually making circles MEAN SOMETHING - should have come before they integrated them into every single other product offering. The front page of youtube now - for me is full of crap that I have no interest in at all.
Just because I've circled someone doesn't mean I want their presence injected into every aspect of my online endeavour. It's annoying as hell. We thought it was safe to circle people because we thought the whole point of circles was the control it gave us.
It's astonishing how google is missing it's own goddamn point - the one we all thought it was trying to make with this product.
-----
Edit:
I should add that I am still willing to say the positives outweigh the negatives at this stage - the chats I'm having on G+ are simply awesome. But fixing this should be their number 1 priority if they don't want folks like me to ditch it.