Circles
Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.
Peoples relationships and interests tend to be grouped by their circles. Whatsapp and Facebook groups seem to understand this which is why they are soo sticky.
What google missed was that nobody wants to sit down and explicitly categorize all their friends into circles. Our social circles are not hard-edged and fixed, they're fuzzy and context-dependent.
Look at Instagram. Many people have multiple accounts, which is a feature built into Instagram itself. It's easy to switch accounts. An individual might have one account (possibly private) for their personal feed meant for friends and family, another account for their instafluencer persona who travels the word taking selfies, and perhaps they have another one for their instafluencer merch shop or whatever.
For everyone using IG, these appear as distinct profiles. The consumer chooses which one to follow. Google Plus gave you one profile, and then made it so that you, the producer of content, chose which followers to target.
Obviously, the technical difference is very slim; for the "producer" there's less difference. And the circle feature isn't without merit. But Google didn't realize that just routing stuff to different places isn't what people want.
Putting a filter (which is what the circles feature could be seen as) on your own stuff is actually the last thing most people want. That's as exciting as doing laundry.
I actually found an weird satisfaction from doing this. It was beneficial for about a month until everyone I knew decided G+ was a ghost town.
I've been checking on how to simplify, gamify, or automation the categorization/labeling aspect for years. I think it would totally change the game on the flat news feed problem.
You’d decide to start following someone and you’d get a screen with checkboxes for all your friends groups, so you could add them to whichever ones you felt appropriate. It was super easy. Or do it later if your feelings on who you wanted to share particular things with changed.
Facebook is the zenith of "explicitly categorizing friends" into friend groups, and as you surmise it's a pretty bad way to go. That, and their group-visibility settings on posts is clunky enough to make me think it's designed so that people stop trying and just post everything to everybody.
I was let down when I found out that when I posted something, it would send people in that circle an e-mail notification.
I stopped posting as soon as I saw that. I'd much rather have people check on my interests at their leisure than having my content forced on them.
This isn't my use case, but a perfect example is people with kids. They're gonna share pictures and stuff of their kids, but as I'm sure you've seen, tons of people make comments like, "I wish I could just filter out pictures of babies and dogs!".
Even whatever you called it in livejournal where you had specific sharing groups of friends - that was a burden to maintain. I eventually lost track of my organization. It just wasn't worth it.
And it winds up being a better implementation of circles. The "circle" is object of interest. It's not a categorization that you put people in, it's an entity in its own right.
After messing up badly in the nymwars, forcibly joining together YouTube accounts with Gmail accounts they actually made a heavyweight but working solution:
It was given the name Pages which was more or less meaningless IMO (in this context).
What it felt like at the time however was a powerful solution for switching between pseudonyms connected to your account.
That said: Given a large reason for why Google+ is shutting down was that they had a couple of huge data leaks maybe we should all be glad kt wasn't too widely used :-]
I really tried to be on team Google+ for a while but it was too little too late.
That's the reason it's already planned shutdown was accelerated, but the leaks occurred after it was essentially abandoned to palliative care.
Had it been sufficiently used, and therefore actively maintained, they may not have occurred.
Bad: Forced to share a single "publicly linked identity" across all those groups. John Doe Public Accountant might not want people to know they also exist as John Doe Death Rocker, and vice-versa.