Google Circle

GoogleCircles was a GooglePlus feature. It enabled users to organize people into groups or lists for sharing[61] across various Google products and services. Organization of circles was done through a drag-and-drop interface[62] until a site redesign in 2015 reduced it to a simple checkbox interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%2B#Circles

Came out of Paul Adams deck.

• Joshua Porter notes competition with/from FaceBook (Facebook Groups). And... it should be noted that Paul Adams left Google in December and now works at Facebook.

Jul01'2011: Dave Winer thinks categorizing your posts (to send to different Circles) is too much work and will fail.

• I Commented (not having used it yet): I think some key ideas (opportunities? challenges?) are:

  1. categories probably work best as "operational" - in other words, not based on some abstract label of "really good friend" vs "current work friend" vs "past work friend" or junk like that, but rather "people I don't mind having see pictures of my kids", "people I don't mind having see my political rants", etc. - the super-challenges part here is that it's hard to keep the number of categories small, and it's hard to pre-define them. (Right now non-Facebook-types get this by the nature of having different silo social graphs for different specialized services.)

  2. categories are different for your "outbox" vs your "inbox". For my outbox, those personal-privacy-trust items from #1 apply, for my inbox it might be about what "priority" I put various streams into, or other categories of "similar" content ("VC blogs", etc.).

  3. categories are person-stream-specific for both inbox and outbox, so even worse than person-specific.

  4. categories are asymmetric. (This is pretty obvious.)

  5. any given stream (inbox and outbox) might belong in multiple categories.

  • The standard Circles pitch of treating "parents from my kids' soccer team" as a different Circle than "guys from Ny Tech Meetup" seems awfully coarse.