Enjoys animation, comics and video games. Loves sharing ideas and meeting new people.
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Are Circles on Google+ Actually New?
Like many others, I’ve wanted something like Google+ Circles for a long time, but since the service is still so new, it’s hard to tell if Google will ever deliver what I want from Circles, or if it will just be another failed attempt at categorizing our friends online (see Twitter lists and Facebook lists).
As someone who has sorted all of his friends on Facebook already, the only real difference I see in Circles is the fact that they’re selling their entire concept as an online space where you can finally categorize your friends. Miraculously, everyone believes it too. Yes, Google’s drag-and-drop GUI works well, and yes, it’s fun because it’s new, but at the end of the day, I already have Circles’ functionality with Facebook. I’ve grouped my Facebook friends into different categories (all of which, like Google+ are hidden from the other user), I can choose to select who sees which updates (just as easily as choosing a Google+ Circle), and I’ve friended 603 people on Facebook (…most of who won’t sign up for Google+ any time soon).
What I want to see from Google Circles (and Facebook and Twitter) is the exact opposite of what they’ve been offering. While choosing who sees which updates is a nice feature to have, I rarely feel the need to hide an update from any group of people. What I do feel constantly is the desire to pick and choose categories I want to read from each individual person. We all have a handful of friends who post tweets and status updates that we enjoy reading back-to-back with posts we have no interest in. For instance, I love hearing the hosts of a variety of video game podcasts tweet about the games they play on a daily basis, but as soon as football season starts, they add a lot of crap to my feed every Sunday. For others, maybe they like the sports tweets, but would rather skip the tweets about movies or family life. Knowing that sometimes I like to filter other people’s feeds occasionally makes me scale back on my own tweeting habits. Maybe the people who like my video game tweets don’t want to know every thought I have about Pixar, and maybe the people following my adventures with Brian Brushwood don’t want to know about how much I love Scott Pilgrim.
I often wonder if we were given the choice to subscribe to subcategories if some of the annoyances we have with social media would go away. As it stands now, everyone seems to be cranky about privacy, which, as far as I’m concerned, is an exact opposite of the Internet’s key characteristics. The problem to solve here is filtration of the massive amount of content we see on a daily basis. When I split apart my groups on Twitter, Facebook, and now Google+ I still get a mishmash of crap because, guess what: people have a variety of interests and no one person is going to talk about one thing and one thing only. Just because I made a Twitter list containing people who are related to video games doesn’t mean that list will only contain updates about video games; the same goes for every Google Circle I made this week. Again, it’s nice to filter who I see updates from via groups and circles, but that’s a problem we’ve already solved whether or not the general social networking public is aware of it. If Google+ wants Circles to win me over, I need something both useful and new.
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