A Pun About Google Plus and The Circles of Hell
By @edent
· google Social Networks · 5 comments · 250 words · read ~724 times.
Google Plus has a serious flaw. It's summed up in this question:
Why are you following me?
I know who I want to share my "I hate my job" posts, and "Oh, my cat is so cute" pictures - but I talk about a wide range of things, not all of which you'll be interested in.
At the moment, I've got nearly 150 people following me - and I don't know which circle to put them in!
So I asked a simple question - what do you want to hear from me - and got a staggering response. 
This is something Nik Butler and I have discussed.
Google needs to let people choose which circles to follow.
I imagine a UI which allows me to set a circle as private ("Work", "Family", "Political ranting") and set some circles as public ("Kitten pictures", "Industry News", "Political thoughts").
When you follow me, you can say "I hate kittens, but I love politics - I'll follow one circle and ignore the others."
At the moment, I don't have the time to categorise 200 people into what I think they're interested. And they don't want to be bombarded with QR codes when all they really want is LOLCATS.
So, come on Google, sort it out - let people choose which circles they want to be in.
Please RT!
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Alex Garcia says:
Very easy. I would put them all in a circle called followers. Then I would post to them every time I post in my blog. If they are following you is because they want to know more about what you do on internet. So just show them, If they like it they will keep following. If not they will leave.
But I am not interested in every thing you do, Alex. Surely you have circles because you only want to post certain information to them? I don't care about your cat, or your dog, but I'm interested in your goldfish.
Pedant says:
Its not up to you to demand that everything I say should be sorted into ever finer classifications.
I decide who I want to speak to on a particular topic.
You can ask me to remove you from that circle if you like, but that's going to mean you miss out on everything else I send to that circle.
Fundamentally, I think, this is the difference between 'a list of friends I believe will be interested' and 'a soapbox that I can shout from' - I think most people believed Facebook would be the former whereas its the latter, and vice versa for Google+
Honestly shocked that this hasn’t come sooner.
it was half there in friendfeed ca 2008 with plans for the other half - saw it presented at FOWA London May 08