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Comment by timmyd | Hacker News Reader

While I haven't used it yet - my biggest difficutly with the service seems to be that Circles actually act as "silos" and are mutually exclusive.

That is, you cannot add "Robert Scoble" to different circles such as "friends" and "Tech feed" - you must choose EITHER "friends" OR "tech feed".

This draws difficulties [and again I haven't used it so please someone clarify if I'm wrong] - if I have a friend who is both a work college and a friend ? Where do I place this user ? I'm assuming "lay tech" people will want the ability to overlap contacts ?

Edit: great thanks for clarifying! :)

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You are wrong. I have added people to different circles, which is quite nice.

Also you don't know which circle you have been added to, so no worries about other peoples feelings....

Oh and if you want an invite, put your email in your gorram profile.

I can confirm that my google+ allows the same person in multiple groups so you can customize broadcasts to multiple different types of groups or individual people.

The neatest thing is the "hang out" mode where you can video/audio/text chat with up to 10 people. This mode already has a neat youtube plugin so everyone can watch the video/movie and comment on it.

Have no fear, Circles are not mutually exclusive. More like Venn diagrams, really.

They're actually just sets, they have nothing to do with Venn diagrams.

It would be pretty neat to be able to see your overlap between circles as a big venn diagram or something of the like. I keep finding out that I have handfuls of mutual friends with people I didn't know shared any of my friends (does that make sense?).

All a Venn (well, Euler, really) diagram would do is show you friends common between circles. I agree that building the graph and finding mutual friends would be nice, though. I generally just go to Facebook and look at our mutual friends, and I'm sometimes surprised, but it would be nice to have a tool that did it automatically.

I wonder if the API has a "mutual friends" call, you could write that pretty easily if so.

Venn diagrams and sets have a good deal to do with each other...

I was referring to circles.

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