Right. And I think the right features will help to produce the conversations in which people will more likely say the things that the algorithms need ;-)
Whether topical circles would enhance or dilute G+ is a matter of opinion of course. You might be right -- I tend to enjoy deep dives more than most.
But I see no reason, either in functional integrity or in social practices, that topical circles would diminish G+. Those not interested would simply not use them -- this is true of FB groups and lists.
It is incredibly difficult to achieve the network density and connectedness required to make a social network stick. Attention is in short supply -- witness Ning's failure to become the social network of interest groups. Perhaps it's not feasible for vertical and niche networks to match the success of the generic social nets. For this reason strikes me as in the ballpark to enable sustained topical conversations where the audience already exists, and where shared topical interests could augment individual profiles and deepen engagement.
I would never have thought of that! Now, if you could grab your content circle and drag that into an audience circle... But as convenient as that would for sharing, I suppose it would create a lot of noise!
But I wonder if unstructured forum isn't precisely the model for sustained conversations best suited to feed/stream interaction?
My sense is that time-based content consumption (streams) beg for solutions that allow activity to preserve and sustain the good stuff. This is essentially how FB updates work. But in FB there's no navigation back to active posts. Which is where I think G+ could provide a real solution.
...in technology it is data loss. History and timeline.
Lack of archiving and activity indicators is haunting every time I post. Will I be able to go back? Some sites are vulnerably unsearchable, deleterious, bankrupt, block, unfree or datalock: same problem. My voice gets lost.
Not often you see a Lacanian reference in this industry. It's more than data loss -- or rather, data is as often the product of interaction and a form of communication as it is just data. So preserving interestingness and relevance by sustaining attention, which is easily accomplished by action (not data), is I think possible. Features simply have to be designed to privilege communication over raw information.
