

A change thousands want made to Google+ circles - btilly
https://plus.google.com/116872576248355504859/posts/gn3uQfCFyRs

======
lojack
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.

~~~
btilly
How is a "channel" different from what I'm describing as a "public group"? It
seems to me to just be a different name for the same thing.

In particular they both appear together in the autocomplete for who you're
going to send your new post to.

~~~
saurik
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.)

~~~
btilly
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.

------
Kilimanjaro
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.

~~~
ericmoritz
If Google's retirement of the Blogger name is evidence of something else, it
would be case #2.

------
danssig
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.

------
ImprovedSilence
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.

~~~
daemin
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)?

~~~
thomaslangston
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).

------
NinetyNine
It seems like people want Reddit more than they want another social networking
site.

~~~
tzs
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?

------
barrybe
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.

~~~
evlapix
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>>There's dozens of existing ways to have public posts that people can
subscribe to (twitter, blogs, mailing lists, etc).

> _But unless I use one medium for each audience, there will be overlap._

No, that's what hashtags on twitter (surely twitter clients do filtering??)
and topics on blogs and groups on Facebook and search wherever is for.

------
ajennings
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.

~~~
carbonica
> 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.

------
username3
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.

------
jharrison
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.

~~~
hboon
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.

~~~
sibsibsib
That's how the 'following' circle works. Notch makes a 'public' post, and
everyone who has him in their following circle will receive the update.

~~~
hboon
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).

------
mc32
Flickr has a pretty good solution to this. You can create public groups,
private groups and invite-only groups.

------
julnepht
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

------
yhlasx
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

------
salman89
Awesome idea. It would be like a reddit, where only top +1ed articles/shares
would pop to your stream. A selective algo

------
extension
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.

~~~
igorgue
<https://plus.google.com/100300281975626912157/posts>

~~~
clobber
Ashton Kutcher is an entrepreneur now and "makes stuff" ?

------
john-n
Sounds like a way for sparks to run. Also, I suspect the 3000+ +'s is the
authors popularity (minecraft) as opposed to the popularity of the comment.

------
schiptsov
Going to once again reinvent IRC? ^_^

------
rbreve
discussion forums + ?

------
drivebyacct2
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".

~~~
btilly
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.

~~~
bermanoid
_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.

------
aMoniker
It seems like Sparks could be modified to support something like that. Maybe
it already supports this exact thing.

~~~
jsavimbi
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.

~~~
dspace
If there's a place anywhere on G+ for a reddit-style up/downvote system, it is
Sparks. Let me teach it what I am interested in.

~~~
jergason
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.

------
avstraliitski
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.

------
AAABBB
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.

------
angerman
My curiosity with G+ increases. Anyone has an invite for me?

~~~
Huppie
Sure, but there's no e-mail address in your profile.

------
Palomides
is it the -1 button? oh, well, that looks cool too :P

