

Show HN: A few weeks ago, I started prototyping the Circles concept. - eegilbert
http://www.circular.io

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tzs
You should have some text on the linked site that says how long the video is.
A lot of people are going to look briefly, see no apparent description of what
you are doing other than the video, and move on. Telling them the video is
only 33 second makes it more likely they'll look.

On the other hand, there is nothing in the imagery in the video that actually
helps understand what you are doing. All the useful information in the video
is in the audio. It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would
take to make a transcript and put that on the site, too.

~~~
alnayyir
>It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would take to make a
transcript and put that on the site, too.

Did it myself, because I despise being forced to watch/listen to A/V without
being given a choice to read the transcript.

My (slightly inaccurate, you'll be able to tell where) transcript of the
homepage video follows:

Facebook and Twitter are crowded places, your mom/sister/etc are all there. It
feels like you're on a big stage talking to an audience.

In real life there are social circles where we're comfortable. Circular uses
(a?) new algorithm to build your social circles from your existing data. The
conversation is bounded within the circle. Only people inside can participate,
so you can be who you really are.

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harryh
Honestly I'm skeptical. The idea of auto generating groups from pre-existing
data isn't particularly new and I'm confident that with enough work it can be
done reasonably well.

But once you've done that, then every time I post a status update (or tweet,
or whatever you end up calling it I'll be forced to consider which circles(s)
I want to share with. This significantly raises the cognitive burden of an
update.

Unless you've got a really clever solution to this problem. In which case
you've got something very interesting indeed and you should definitely keep
going.

~~~
warfangle
If you set up a bayesian filter to classify the status update as you type,
that would be pretty rad. Then you'd just have to make sure it's classified
correctly before you hit submit.

Or just have different sections/tabs for each of the detected cliques
(detecting cliques is a (edit: somewhat) solved problem:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory)> ). It'd be the onus of
the user to name the cliques, with a suggested default of what others in the
clique have named it.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
The thing I'm worried about with "public" cliques is that you need to worry
about excluding people. What if someone you don't want wants to join your
clique?

~~~
warfangle
I'm thinking they wouldn't be public to the world - only to those in your
friends list within those cliques.

That way if someone you don't want joins your clique, it shouldn't matter - if
you're not friends with them.

Cliques should, ideally, correspond to smallish social circles. Such that you
can easily monitor and make sure the right people are ending up in the 'right
buckets.'

For example, excluding family and co-workers, I have two primary groups of
friends. Those in my neighborhood, whom I know based on locality, and those
scattered around the city, whom I know (and know each other) through mutual
interests. One has nine individuals (with more - about 5-10 who are
acquaintances, but not truly friends), and the other has eight individuals
(with more - again, about 5-10 who are acquaintances).

Maybe I'm a-social or something. But. There is no overlap between these
groups. I've introduced a few in one to a few in the other, but there's no
reason for them to gel. They probably aren't friends on Facebook. Using
cluster analysis, you could easily partition my groups of friends &
acquaintances out.

Can you give an example of what kind of situation might confuse this system?
What if it took further demographics into account as vertices with directed
edges (whereas friendship, in the graph, is an undirected edge), such as age
group, gender, location, employer?

I would assume that status updates only travel one hop on the graph, so that
even if someone becomes a part of one of these clusters, if you don't have an
explicit connection to them your status updates cannot be seen by them.

You could further weight the edges by how often you communicate with each
other via the service.

What would probably happen - and pure conjecture here - is that you would be
exposing your status updates to either the boundary of a cluster (you are on
the outside of the cluster, with a few connections in), or to most of the
cluster (you are in the center of the cluster, with many connections in it).
Situation one is more likely with friends (unless they are very isolated
friends indeed), while situation two is more likely with family and co
workers. Likely, you (and perhaps your spouse) would be the only people in
your family network that have direct connections to people in, say, a
drinking-buddies network. Unless members of your family are also drinking
buddies.

------
Skywing
You asked if you should continue working on this. Based on your site, and
video, it's hard to say. I really have no actual idea how the site itself is
going to function, or what it's actually going to do.

------
codeslush
Yes, you should. It's much needed. How you do it will determine your success.
I've got my own ideas around this, and played around with it minimally last
weekend. The first person that gets this right and can execute will win big.

------
starpilot
I think everyone's relying on clever implementations that require people to
"just try it out" and give it a fair shake to be convinced that it's better
technology. No one will give it a fair shake, why should they when Facebook
works fine for most people? There's also no attempt at breaching the chicken-
and-egg problem of joining a new social network while one's friends are all
still on the old one. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I think most
people are looking at the wrong problems.

~~~
blehn
I'm not sure I follow. Isn't that a problem with any market where there's
already a dominant player? You're saying that rather than coming up with a
better solution, people should be thinking about better ways to get people to
sign up?

    
    
      Why would I use this Facebook thing when MySpace works fine?
      Why would I use Reddit when Digg works fine?
      Why would I use OkCupid when Match.com works fine?
      Why would I use an iPhone when my Blackberry works fine?

------
ZackOfAllTrades
You could really make waves if you made a way to better organize your friends
visually.

Option A: People's icons as little boxes that I can drag around. Make a venn
diagram for groups. When you friend people, you select their group(s) by
dragging their icon to the right circle/shape. A video/slideshare by google on
here a while ago showed how friend groups and cliques were more varied than
just one big group. Play off that concept and let people create their own
boxes.

Option B: Create a pseudo-tree of connections. Play to people's egos and show
them at the center of the tree. Make the neighboring vertices be groups and
let friends branch off the group. The pseudo part comes in when people are
repeated within groups: either repeat them as vertices on the tree or have
more than one edge coming off. I prefer the later, as it would make for a
cooler tree.

But really, whatever you make will be better than facebook. Also, probably
should never let other people see a person's groups. It could cause severe
problems socially.

------
smoody
I, along with the rest of my team, created the same concept back in 1998 and
by the year 2000, we were averaging between 14 million and 20 million
pageviews per day which, even in this day and age, is still a decent amount of
pageviews!

But that's the internet -- everything old is new again. The old. Then new.
Then...

~~~
michaelchisari
Yeah, I remember even Livejournal had friends filters. The reason Facebook
won't do this is probably a specific business decision.

------
michaelchisari
I've had privacy circles in Appleseed since about 2006. You might want to
check it out:

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org>

Although the circles aren't auto-generated, the user creates them.

------
eegilbert
Should I keep going?

~~~
huhtenberg
This really depends on why you are doing this.

The concept itself is trivial and not exactly new. It has been around for ages
in a form of private areas on BBS'es (remember those?). It is implementing the
concept in a way that compares to Facebook - that's where the challenge is.

Also, realistically speaking, the chances of making people switch away from
Facebook are really low, even if Facebook shows an astounding lack of
foresight and does _not_ roll out a circles-like paradigm really soon. People
are lazy and Facebook ties are sticky. Those who are not on Facebook are not
there for privacy reasons, so they aren't likely to flock to your service
either.

So it all depends what you want to get out of the project. In any case, if you
can and decide to continue, it would be a great learning experience on all
fronts - from technical to design to marketing - I can guarantee it :)

~~~
guptaneil
Facebook did try to implement something like this with their updated Groups
functionality, but it still hasn't caught on. There's definitely a wide open
gap for somebody to make a usable circles-like social network, but it would
probably need to use the Facebook social graph as a starting point to gain any
traction, and would probably want to aim for an exit strategy that ends with
either Google or Facebook buying them out.

I tried working on a similar idea a couple years ago, but dropped it because I
couldn't find enough of a draw to make even myself switch over from Facebook
to my network, let alone other people. I wish the OP best of luck in executing
this idea better than anybody else has managed to yet.

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Noleli
Without a data importer, there seems to be an initial conditions problem, not
just from a user acquisition standpoint, but from an algorithmic standpoint.
How can it use network analysis to infer cliques when starting with such a
small/sparse/nonexistent network?

Maybe you could add this to Diaspora. It may be burgeoning, but it's open
source and does have users. Also, how does this differ from Diaspora's
aspects?

That said, yes! There is definitely a need for it.

------
hackscribe
I've also started working on a similar concept. My approach to this problem is
to use context based LISTSERVs. The goal is to help make social sharing
relevant by targeting both interests and "social roles".

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alex_carlill
This is a shit concept and it's not gonna go anywhere.

