
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work - vijaydev
http://zachholman.com/posts/shit-work/
======
Pewpewarrows
He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of
friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks
down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for
your location, school, and work.

As I see it there are three modes of sharing:

The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to
declare it to the world. This goes in public.

The second is where my post is pretty irrelevant to most of my friends, and is
really only directed at a portion of them. So to prevent clogging the feeds of
the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies."
Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up. On the other hand, I
rarely care enough to only post to a group instead of public.

The third situation is the opposite of the second: there is a very specific
group of people that I don't want to see what I'm about to post. Planning a
surprise party or uploading party photos from the night before fall here. In
that circumstance I only choose to post to a specific group of close friends.
Again, something that Facebook can't deduce from my profile.

You can't get around #3 without doing shit work, except by not posting it to
begin with. As a developer you can't avoid this: sometimes manual labor really
is the only solution to a problem. Until we invent mind-reading, of course.

~~~
aprescott
Reading your three situations, I have another one which I've been thinking
about: a post which is informative and in some way beneficial to the public,
but which a significant portion of the people you know simply do not care
about.

For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history
of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of
your non-technical friends, along with your family, in all likelihood do not
care about this and will not find it interesting, so it's just noise to them.
If you post it publicly, it's worthwhile to the Internet at large, but
annoying to a select group. If you post it so that only the relevant
individuals see it, and no one else, then the public potentially lose out.

Is there a simple solution here which I'm just not seeing? Is there a social
network that deals with this appropriately? With Facebook, you can
"unsubscribe", which means hiding a user's posts from your feed, but that
seems like overkill. How do prominent developers deal with this? Do they just
make their posts more generic and mainstream, and move the technical
discussion elsewhere? Or do they just let their non-technical friends and
family Deal With It?

Perhaps one solution is to mark a post with "Family don't need to see this",
then skip the post for anyone in Family who views their
stream/feed/timeline/whatever, probably with an unobtrusive notice which says
"post skipped". But then there's added complexity, and — getting back to
Zach's main point — it's more shit work.

~~~
Timothee
I see what you mean.

My personal "solution" is that I typically share personal stuff exclusively on
Facebook (non-public posts) and what is more "technical" (comments or
questions on tech, products, etc.) on Twitter. (and HN)

For example, I didn't announce the birth of my daughter on Twitter, because
I've known the people who follow me in mostly professional settings. Some of
those might be friends too, but if they are, they're probably on Facebook too.

Works well for the most part, except when I'd be interested in the opinion of
Facebook friends that are not on Twitter… But it won't work for everyone
either.

I realize that it's possible that I am missing out on opportunities to create
stronger personal relationships with people on Twitter by not discussing
personal matters there, but that's honestly getting too complicated. :)

~~~
dylangs1030
I think that's the easiest solution. Twitter and Facebook have two different
atmospheres - you don't get 20,000 followers because you have 20,000 friends,
but because you have 20,000 people interested in your role as a professional
authority and your posts about product trends, etc. Similarly, Facebook isn't
tailored to disseminating a lot of information to a lot of people quickly and
consistently - the number of people who'd really care about your personal life
is almost always much lower than the number of people interested in new
product information from your company (presuming they have a professional
stake in it).

~~~
Timothee
Though, in my case, I'm still working on establishing my professional
authority on Twitter… :) As a matter of fact my number of Facebook friends and
Twitter followers are dangerously close.

------
danso
The author seems to be missing a gigantic point of order here. The reason why
Facebook is algorithmically able to determine groups for you is because you,
the user, have already entered in fields for Work, School, Location, etc. So
the user has had to do a small amount of shit work for Facebook to do its
magic.

Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing
friends into circles. But G+ does not (yet) have the same kind of parsed
personal/profile information, which would require the same mechanism that FB
has (deciding who to reveal what parts of your profile to)...and which, as far
as I can tell, is not trivial to implement, or to graft on to the existing
Google Account structure.

Of course, Google can ALREADY do this for you. No doubt they have mined enough
information about each user, including locations of IP addresses, to fill out
most of your boilerplate profile info. It doesn't take the EFF to realize the
privacy implications of auto-filling your circles with people who don't
realize that Google's algorithm has correctly guessed their location, age,
school and workplace and is now implicitly exposing such information.

~~~
Timothee
I think that the part where entering your info into Facebook appears less like
shit work is that it's typically factual and structured: I worked there, I
studied here, these people are family members.

Google +'s circles are completely up-to-you, for better or for worse, and you
hit ambiguous parts more quickly: is that guy a friend or an acquaintance?
Should I put him in "Tech", "Ruby", both?

But of course, as you go deeper in either product, you'll soon find the same
ambiguities and amount of shit work.

~~~
danso
No disagreement there...I think it's just extremely difficult for Google+ to
do auto-circling without either:

a) Creating a Facebook-like profile system, with more regimented fields and
discrete data.

b) Totally disregarding users' privacy by doing it for them.

All of these are technically possible for Google, but they also have their
major drawbacks. Where Google has been able to do it without downside - your
private list of closest GMail and GChat contacts - it _has_.

------
joebadmo
Griping about an optional feature? Really?

Circles have great utility for me for two reasons.

1\. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see
information from certain groups of people for different things.

2\. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups
of people.

If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing
stopping you from ignoring them completely.

I will never ever ever trust an algorithm to get this right, except for the
most trivial cases, and if the case is that trivial, I will default to public.

I think ultimately the problem is that these features are trying to replicate
offline social context, but only getting halfway there. I've written more
about this: [http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-
perfo...](http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-performance)

~~~
bodegajed
Optional? I don't think so. Google Circle _is_ the main feature. That's
everything Google+ is about.

~~~
joebadmo
Circle management is optional. If you want to use it like Twitter, you can.
Just dump everyone in one Circle and spray your content indiscriminately to
everyone in it.

~~~
strager
> Just dump everyone in one Circle

To me, this is shit work (that the author was talking about).

~~~
joebadmo
Then you've never actually done it. It's two clicks. You're just looking for
something to complain about.

------
seigenblues
I'd really love for a social network to correctly anticipate all the people
i'd like to share something with, and to automagically categorize stuff like
that. It'd be sweet. But it seems like the worst-case scenario if it gets it
wrong could be pretty terrible.

He's absolutely right, though, that a key problem with circles and lists and
other shit work is that it's very rarely well integrated into the clients.

(I also want disagree with the claim that "no one wants to do shit work". I
believe the entire genre of MMORPGs -- even, dare i say, RTS' -- stand as
testament against. They also suggest how high peoples tolerance of shit work
is if it is well integrated into a client ;)

~~~
jeromeparadis
Yeah but in MMORPGs, people do shit work to get rewards...

------
dasil003
It's funny because I was sort of nodding along through the beginning. I am one
of the very people he mentioned with a bunch of stillborn Twitter lists. But
then he went on to reference a Merlin Mann article:

> _His main point is that adding an assortment of labels, tags, and priorities
> to your email inbox only serves to give you the illusion of getting work
> done._

Which I understand, because Mann has a tendency to get into the fiddly bits,
and so do I, but what's missing is that these things do potentially have
utility. Case in point: I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of non-spam emails a
day. I used to use Apple Mail until it couldn't really handle the volume very
well, then I switched to Gmail and learned the keyboard shortcuts. Eventually
I got into labels. The UI makes it super easy to apply labels, and I label
every important email. This could be considered "shit work", but it provides a
solid ROI because it allows me to browse through project summaries, and makes
it much less likely for things to slip through the cracks. It's amenable to
automation in that I can create rules, but mostly it relies on my ability to
tag every single email. It sounds like a lot of work, but once the system is
in place it doesn't actually take any time to hit 'l' and autocomplete a label
or two.

Meanwhile, Google's attempt to improve productivity without shit work—Priority
Inbox—actually provides me negative value. It doesn't matter how good it is
because if it's less than perfect I can't trust it, and it can't ever be
perfect because countless externalities affect my idea of priorities. In the
end, the assigned ratings become more noise that I have to deal with.

So while the point about not letting busy-work make you feel productive is a
valid warning, it doesn't follow that if it can't be automated it isn't
useful. It's all about ROI. I think the problem with Twitter and Google+ is
that they just aren't useful enough to sink that much time into unless there
is a direct professional purpose.

~~~
josh33
I disagree with one point. Priority Inbox tells me which email subjects to
skim and which to open every time. For the few important emails that make it
into the non-important bucket, skimming the subjects always brings them out.
However, EVERY email in my important inbox is important (I haven't had to mark
one as unimportant for months). When I sit down to go through email (2-3 times
a day) I read everything in the priority inbox because I trust that.

------
drblast
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't understand the compulsion to post
potentially embarassing information about yourself on the Internet.

I can't believe people are arguing about the right way to do this.

Twenty years ago, it was rare for someone to call everyone they ever knew and
scream into the phone how drunk they were. I might have done that only once or
twice in my life. (If I called you by mistake and woke you up at 2AM, I
apologize.)

But today, if you can't provide a web-based service that not only allows you
to do that very thing but protects you from the consequences of it, people
will complain.

~~~
skore
I think you are confusing push and pull communication. Twitter does not ring
up every single person on the planet whenever I share something, but what I
share does appear in their feed once they care to check.

If it were push communication, you'd be right to complain, but since it is
pull communication, other rules of etiquette apply.

------
henryprecheur
Sometime shitwork can be a very good way to find new possibilities. A lot of
people do shitwork that's immensely useful, like editors on Wikipedia,
moderators on reddit and forums, people who enter all the data into imdb. I
don't see how those people could be replaced by algorithms with what we know
now.

Sometime shitwork needs to be done because you can't simplify. I'm doubtful
that Facebook's auto-group feature would work for me. Maybe me doing shitwork
on Google+ is what work for me, because I value my freedom to control my
information online.

------
Permit
When Google+ released, I remember being somewhat confused that they opted for
user defined Circles rather than using user relations as a gauge for friend
"closeness". As the author of this blog post points out, users almost never
want to get stuck placing hundreds of people in groups that could change at
any time.

In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line: "Although users of
online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such
as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly
cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit
groups."

I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their
Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.

[1]Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph
([http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37120.pdf))

------
nl
Circles is a great marketing feature.

By pushing the privacy aspect of Google+ it allowed Google to differentiate
themselves compared to Facebook. That message has persisted.

Users _say_ they care heavily about privacy, but in practice they don't[1].
Circles isn't a bad solution to that, except for the small minority of people
who feel the pressure try to build themselves a compete categorisation of
everyone they know.

[1] Occasionally people do care - picture sharing is one case where people are
somewhat careful. Circles caters to that case quite well.

------
michaelchisari
_The problem is that, anecdotally, no one seems to use Lists_

That anecdote is not really worth much. Especially because those lists are
probably very important for those who _do_ use them.

Most people won't care about filtering their social relationships, until they
do care. At that point, you want them to have the option.

------
pud
The problem is that the cost/benefit of creating lists & circles isn't high
enough.

Many developers obsess over the edge-case of "how do I post secret information
that is only shown to the correct list?"

When in fact, normal people just want to post "Going to Aunt Edna's tomorrow!"
to their family list, because it's irrelevant to non-family.

It seems Facebook agrees, with their loosey-goosey smart lists.

------
lukev
But, but... I _like_ putting my friends into Venn diagrams.

Seriously. The 1 click it takes to put someone is a circle isn't really
"work", and if it saves me awkward calls from my mom because she read a post
intended for my drinking buddies, then it was _well worth it._

~~~
dylangs1030
I agree. But the author is making a point about how justified these features
are and how arbitrary they _can_ be for users. Personally, I never distinguish
who I publish statuses too. But I can understand why that's a useful feature.
And he DID praise that feature for Facebook.

What he _isn't_ praising is when a user compulsively uses a feature which is
superfluous. A huge assortment of different tags and labels in email isn't
really justified. Sure, you can find a use for it. But most users arguably
organize their entire mailbox into these neat categories, and thereafter, half
of them are never used again.

~~~
lukev
I know people who are compulsive about having a clean Gmail inbox, and who
derive lots of value from tags. I also know people (like me) who are perfectly
ok having 10k messages in their inbox, and searching for stuff as required.

The nice thing is, Gmail supports both of these use patterns equally well.

Ideally, that's how every product should treat it's more advanced features. If
a user spends the time creating taxonomies they'll never use, well, that's
more the user's fault than the software's...

------
eftpotrm
Ah, this argument again. Simplicity rules.

I disagree. I like being able to set filters and granularity. I like having
the option to give me the information I want, in the way I want it. I'm
prepared to do the extra up-front setup to get the better end experience; I
have hundreds of filters set up on my email, for example.

Don't give me forced simplicity; give me the option to tune it to my needs and
give it the power to make it actually useful.

~~~
jakemcgraw
It's not about simplicity vs. complexity, or whether complex features are A
Bad Thing. It's about matching complexity with utility. You shouldn't force
your users to do a bunch of work (in this case building Google+ Circles or
Twitter Lists) and then under utilize that investment of user time.

------
nplusone
Still, it would be nice to be able to create groups to watch and filter
repositories and users on GitHub.

~~~
alpb
That's a good answer to Zach. I'm having problem of too much noise when I
follow a lot of projects and people on GitHub.

~~~
sudonim
What are you trying to accomplish by following projects on github? Maybe they
can make activity on projects more meaningful, like show you more activity if
you're a committer or only big commits if the project is very active but you
don't often click on activity items.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
That's the point: it's very difficult to automatically determine what someone
wants when they follow a project. Sometimes I only want to bookmark it because
I know I'll find it useful in the future. Other times, I only care when a new
stable version of it is released, with a changelog. When I'm a participant I
want to see more details, like new issues or commits.

Instead, because of the lack of options, we're left with an unusable wall of
notifications. Smaller projects get drowned out by larger ones, and it tells
me every little detail of what is going on with every single project. I'm
pretty sure I've never clicked on a single link from it in the past few years
of using GitHub.

~~~
vijaydev
Plug: I built a Chrome extension called "GitHub Feed Filter"
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdgbehajihicjalkc)
precisely for this reason. The notifications are just too many when you follow
too many projects.

------
tomlin
Absolutely right. I am finding that, especially with mobile, you have to
really think about the design so that _shit work_ is cut to a minimum. For
example, I am in the process of making an iOS app, but it interfaces with an
external appliance. I don't _want_ to ask the user to input host, port, etc.,
so instead I'd much rather do the extra leg work and implement uPnP detection
and _then_ ask the user as a last resort. Apple has figured this out. 70% is
in your face while the rest is within hands reach.

As an analogy, Circles is driving users to a brick wall hoping they will climb
over to see what is the big deal is. Assuming they care. Assuming they aren't
in the middle of something when they get the invite.

Which makes me think about the "Find My Friends" App on iOS. If Apple flipped
the "social" switch, they would have creatively acquired a power which no
other social network would be able to grasp without huge privacy backlash -
knowledge of where you and all of your friends are at any given time. Here's
the sell: You already have the app. How does this relate to _shit work_? Well,
you'd be apart of a social network where you, your friends are already
members, your latest photos are already there (iCloud), you know where your
friends are and what they are doing - and you did very little work.

------
petercooper
Agreed. This is the primary reason I don't use Google+. I haven't got the time
or inclination to split people into groups or even figure out what those
groups might be. I did _try_ but found it a taxing process.

Automatically coming up with criteria to filter by is a great solution. I'd
love if I could send a tweet just to my UK followers or to those who tweet
about "Ruby" a lot. This is all easily solved by machines and doesn't require
me to do anything by hand.

------
eric-hu
> Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter
> accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy,
> I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t.
> You did shit work.

This made me laugh.

I half-agree with the post. There is an element of "shit work" that actually
makes users feel engaged. For instance, my iGoogle homepage has feeds set up
with sites I've had to hunt down an RSS for and manually enter. I've had to
invest time into rearranging the layout to my priorities.

It's 'shit work' in that it's manual and somewhat trial-and-error, but it
leaves me feeling more invested in the product if I'm ultimately more
satisfied with the end result.

Disclaimer: I am a PC/ubuntu guy, so I understand that mine may not be the
mainstream opinion.

------
dprice1
I use twitter lists, in part because Tweetdeck makes them easy to view. I like
to follow the various food trucks around town, but usually I am only
interested in them when hungry. Having them collected in a list keeps them out
of my main feed.

They are a pain to maintain, however.

~~~
sehugg
One under-appreciated feature of lists is that they can also be followed. For
example someone else could follow your carefully-cultivated list of food
trucks! (I do this with someone else's list :) )

------
ajpatel
I think there are 2 camps of users - I'd rather organize my own lists than
trust Facebook to do it for me. I honestly don't trust Facebook to do it...

The author of the article hasn't completely thought this through though. He's
saying it's shit work which Facebook automates for you but then he goes on to
say relationships are complicated and some people are in overlapping
"circles."

He shoots himself in the foot right there. Facebook's auto-populated groups
can't figure out the complicated nature of our relationships with people. I
have many shades of friends and people who have varied interests even within
those shades of friends. It's too hard for an algorithm to be able to deduce
this very human aspect of relationships.

------
23u7890s7df
This article makes no sense... You are rightly pointing out that it takes some
effort to maintain your privacy and think about managing your circles of
friends on G+ and then you compare it with _nothing_ that provides that
ability on Facebook. Yes, thinking is hard. If you are ok with saying
everything to everybody then you don't have to do it. But Facebook making a
few broad automated groups for you solves none of the problems you describe...
How does Facebook know who you want to share your drinking stories with? At
least Google puts it up front and makes it part of the whole fabric of their
product... you always think about circles... just like in freaking real life.

------
mightybyte
Totally disagree. First, if you don't want to categorize, then don't--use one
big circle. I actually want to have fine-grained control over who I publish
to, and Facebook's auto-discovered groups touted in the article don't do it
for me. The whole "Don't embrace the shit work" is not relevant either because
you can't judge the value of a product by people who don't use it
productively. BTW, Most time spent on Facebook period isn't REAL work. This is
precisely why I don't have a Facebook account and don't spend tons of time on
Google+. But circles are crucial to my use of Google+, and Facebook's lack of
a good implementation of the idea is the reason I never used it.

~~~
dylangs1030
I don't disagree, but then, I'm not sure you can make a good comparison
between Google+ and Facebook. One is meant for productivity - Google+ was
marketed from the start as a more business-inclined way to interact with
people (conferences, setting up meetings, etc.). Facebook isn't really trying
to be productive, so perhaps the author shouldn't have used the comparison at
all. Facebook is really just about interacting vicariously through the
internet, with no rhyme or reason to it.

------
punkassjim
This is why I don't have any interest in buying an Android phone: everyone I
know who has one, all the excitement I hear about is their fancy keyboard
replacement, or the aftermarket launcher they found to replace the sluggish
stock one. Now, I do understand the appeal, if that's what you want to tinker
with. I tinker with Volkswagens — I know they're not the finest car I could
get my hands on. But when it comes to a smartphone, I'd rather buy the best
thing in the store. Even if you're excited that your platform gives you the
"freedom" to replace its crappy stock components, that doesn't negate the fact
that it's just the freedom to do shit work. So, y'know, flame away.

------
pyrhho
And yet I still have to explicitly click the 'Mark all notifications as read'
button after reading, and closing a pull request on github...

Edit: That probably came across more snarky than I intended. The point was
that this is easily said, but hard to do right.

------
Igor_Bratnikov
Just bc some people are lazy it doesn't mean that there isn't a sub of people
that equally value the outcome of their so called shit work and would seek an
alternative to the product if it didn't have the features.

Motivation is a big factor as well. G+ the motivation is vague, what benefit
do you really gain? I know a bunch of people that jumped on Facebook's lists
bc of privacy concerns and desire to limit dissemination of their content to
unwanted people. For them their privacy >> a base amount of "shit work"... so
author not quite right

------
mrclark411
Or at least make it fun (game).

Or make it more valuable. If being on specific Twitter lists drove more
followers or was perceived to be important then getting people to put you on
specific lists would be important.

But it isn't. Now.

------
cmasontaylor
Twitter Lists may not be popular, for exactly the reasons you describe, but
they're really useful for two purposes: if you follow a LOT of people (for
whatever reason), you can use Twitter for 'people whose posts I actually want
to read' and if you use it for news consumption, you can make lists for that.
I use it especially for the latter; being someone who follows iOS jail
breaking, 99% of the time, Twitter is the original source for all of the news
related to that.

------
tszming
(Sorry for hijacking)

In the new GitHub project page (e.g.
<https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-iphone>), it really took me some times to
figure out where is the DOWNLOAD button..Please put the download button back
to the top right area (next to the watch/fork buttons), and don't give your
users shit work... Thank you!

(Btw, I agree what you said in your article!)

------
taariqlewis
I think the list scope and features differ with respect to the nature of the
type of followers. Twitter is a broadcast medium. Thus, Twitter lists are very
different than Google+ Circles which are asynchronous sharing vs. asynchronous
follow. There are also 2 types of shit work:

1\. List Creation

2\. List Maintenance

These are two different activities that in different networks require varying
attention and utility out of the effort.

------
scott_s
I agree. Something I said a few months ago:

I think most people have relatively clear friend/work boundaries, but even
then I encountered a few "Hmmm" moments when putting people in circles. I
suspect that most people don't actually want to group the people in their
social network - it can take a surprising amount of introspection. Time will
tell if that's true.

------
steve8918
This is similar to the problem that Picasa has. Their facial recognition
technology is really cool, but the work that I need to go through is so
immensely tedious that I stopped bothering. Having to approve tens of
thousands of faces just doesn't work. And then if you move the photo
directory, you lose everything.

~~~
ctdonath
"immensely tedious"

Aye, there's the rub. IT'S NOT FUN.

Disturbs me that on Netflix I've rated six-hundred-and-fifty-four movies -
that's a huge amount of "$#!^ work", yet I did it compulsively and enjoyed it.
That's the whole thing about "crowd sourcing", "data mining", etc. - persuade
people to WANT to do the work, and they will with little complaint. If your
users are viewing it as "$#!^ work", you've done it wrong.

------
gizzlon
Alittle OT, but the thing that struck me while reading is that organizing
should be a means to and end and not the end itself.

If you organize to speed up your "real work" great. If you organize to
organize, that's shit work.

I'm not sure what category g+ circles are in though..

------
ghc
Is organizing your bookshelf in iBooks shit work? After reading the article,
I'm sure the author would classify it as such. But Apple is smart enough to
figure this stuff out. In fact, they're experts at it. What's Apple's
reasoning?

------
drcube
Funny, how soon we forget that shit work is what Myspace was all about. That
was the use case. Typing in a giant, unstructured list of your favorite
artists or installing some way-too-busy image as your profile background in
order to impress your friends was the highlight of the "social network" as it
existed in 2004.

People, mostly women in my experience, loved that "shit work" the same way
they loved putting on makeup or shopping for uncomfortable clothes.

Some work is enjoyable. People do it for fun. Like gardening, or knitting, or
cooking. I believe social networks are kind of like that, for at least some
subset of the population. Privacy probably shouldn't be that way, but sadly, I
think we all know how scarce people are who actually care about their privacy.

~~~
dgabriel
> People, mostly women in my experience, loved that "shit work" the same way
> they loved putting on makeup or shopping for uncomfortable clothes.

Really?

~~~
drcube
It could very well just be the people I know. It isn't meant to be sexist.

My point is that people enjoy putting effort into their public persona and
appearance, and put up with a lot of crap to perfect it.

------
gvr
Peter Drucker said something along the lines of "there's no greater form of
waste than doing that which shouldn't be done at all with great efficiency."

Google Circles is an elegant solution to the wrong problem.

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im3w1l
Having people manually set up circles is an O(n^2) solution. Having people
join circles, is an O(n) solution.

Not exploiting that circles are (approximately) equivalence classes is
borderline criminal

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AznHisoka
Google+ doesn't tap into any of the 7 seven sins. Facebook does. Case closed.
I'm willing to do shit work if it taps into my desire for vanity.

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EGreg
it's all in the sell, as Tom Sawyer realized.

Our app "Groups" is praised by people who can use it to ... organize their
contacts :)

Guess what's next ... a social network.

<http://qbix.com/GROUPS>

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marze
To summarize: don't forget people are lazy.

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psweber
Great point. Terrible positive example.

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vladsanchez
This guy is becoming my "hero"! =D

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miles_matthias
Completely agree.

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dos1
For one, I don't really feel like the expletive in the title helped his cause
at all. A better title would have been "Facebook suggests groupings of your
friends for you!"

I also thought his example was contrived. I mean, is there anyone who's so
worried about their social networks that they will hem and haw over whether
someone is a coworker or drinking buddy or whatever? And if there is someone
like that, well thank goodness Google+ supports their neuroses!

~~~
scott_s
"Shit work" is a common enough phrase that it seemed appropriate to me.

~~~
tensor
A phrase is not deemed appropriate solely because it is common. There are and
have been many inappropriate common phrases in use over the years.

The author had an interesting point, but I found his use of "shit work" over
and over to be distasteful enough to not want to read his blog again. It is an
overloaded and crass term that only served to hurt his otherwise interesting
argument.

~~~
scott_s
I felt it was appropriate because the phrase, even if it was crass, exactly
captured what he was talking about. I like it when people use the best word or
phrase to describe something, even if it's a crass phrase.

~~~
Skillset
Perhaps "poo work" or "feces work" would have been more apropos.

~~~
scott_s
But those are _not_ well known phrases. If you mean "shit work," say "shit
work." To do otherwise is bad writing.

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drivebyacct2
Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and
I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying
thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every
time I publish to a specific list.

I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use
Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

~~~
nchuhoai
the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle
feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact
it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

~~~
drivebyacct2
So, it's not magic because it can't read my mind, thus it's a bad feature
because it takes work to fully, fully utilize? I guess I'm still missing the
point. It'd be nice if Google knew my relationship with these people or
somehow knew my best friends from my colleagues or tech interests, but that's
asking a bit much.

~~~
drumdance
It's a suboptimal feature. Most developers like to write code that gets used a
lot (at least I do). If a feature that you hoped will be popular is only used
by a tiny subset, then you probably failed.

In Facebook's case, they may have written the initial lists feature as way to
show they're "doing something" about privacy, so simply deploying the feature
is a win.

But in Google's case, they've made Circles a central feature of their platform
and it's coming up short (so far at least).

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jsavimbi
The main reason that drove me to delete my G+ account was the way circles were
managed. I had done pretty well so far with 300+ people in my circles but then
made the mistake of importing some shared lists into pre-configured lists and
ended up with a bunch of grannies posting in my Node.js circle. To comb
through, curate and modify a 600+ user circle proved to be way too much shit
work than I was willing to do, so I just went ahead and deleted the account.

And I didn't even begin to address the amount of shit content replicated
across all of my social media accounts by the same people.

