It's expensive to self-host, there are moderation problems, and the difficulty level is too high for most people.

But, in my opinion, I think he misunderstands something about self-hosting because, as a term, it is both misleading and unhelpful. When people say "Defund The Police" what they mean is "Move funds away from miliary style policing and give it to trained mental health professionals" - what people hear is "Abolish the police and let anarchy reign".

The ability to "Self Host" doesn't just mean "run this on a Raspberry Pi in your cupboard and be responsible for constant maintenance". Yes, you can do that if you're a masochist, but it isn't restricted to that.

To me, "Self-Hosting" means "I am in control of where I host something". I currently pay a company to host this blog. It has previously been hosted on Blogger, WordPress, my own VPS, and a variety of other services. Tomorrow I could decide to host it with a big company, or I could run it from my phone. I get to choose. That's what "Self-Hosting" is - a choice in where to host.

Similarly, Mastodon allows me self-host my account. I can have my content on one of the big servers and let them do moderation, storage, and maintenance for me - or I can move my account anywhere I choose. To a server in my cupboard and back again.

Email is similar. I know people who've gone from CompuServe, to HoTMaiL, to Gmail, to their own domain, then to OutLook. Their address-book moves with them. Forwarding rules ensure incoming email is routed correctly. They can choose to actively moderate spam, or outsource it. They can pay a company to host, keep backups in their basement, or watch adverts in return for services.

I agree with nearly everything Mathew says in his post. It is absurdly privileged to think that running your own services is something normal people want to do and are capable of doing. Strong regulation helps everyone, people want simplicity, and ecosystems can be fragile.

But witness all the people moving over from Twitter to new networks. Do they care where their data is hosted and how it is maintained? No! But they want to move their social graph with them. And when BlueSky and Mastodon collapse, people will want to move again.

In the UK, I have the ability to move my phone number between hundreds of providers. If I'm particularly techy, I can even run my own infrastructure and route the number there. People love the fact that they can leave crappy service providers and move somewhere cheaper or with with better customer service or whatever it is they value. I think that's a form of self-hosting; I get to choose who provides my services.

Similarly, I believe people have a desire for "self-hosting" which is difficult for them to articulate. They want to move their data around - be it old photos, a social graph, or a username. Most of them don't really care about the underlying technology (and why should they?) but they do care about continuity of service and being able to escape crappy service providers.

So, that's my reckons. Self-Hosting means you can choose where to host, and I think most people can find value in that.

What do you think?

Take, for example, this tale from museum-worker Aaron Cope:

I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one for each object in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection”. My friend looked at me for a moment, laughed, and then simply said: No.

In that blog post, Aaron reveals that the San Francisco International Airport Museum is using ActivityPub to create automated social-media bot accounts for all its exhibits and, possibly, every object it hold.

And why not! That would be close to impossible to do on a centralised service. But on a decentralised service under your own control, it is relatively simple. Perhaps I only want to follow the museum's canteen, or I just want to engage with a specific artefact. The Fediverse makes that possible.

This reminds me of the Melbourne "treemail" phenomenon. Every tree in the city had an email address, ostensibly so residents could email maintenance issues for a specific tree. Instead, people started interacting with the trees and sending them little love notes!

Dearest Golden Elm Tree, I finally found you! As in I see you everyday on my way to uni, but I had no idea of what kind of tree you are. You are the most beautiful tree in the city and I love you

A few weeks ago, I read about Ben Smith inventing Tweeting trains. With a bit of code, every train line in the UK was suddenly represented on the web in a convenient format. Well… Convenient if you were on Twitter.

Museums, trees, and trains naturally brings me on to the Internet of Things. I think it is fair to say that IoT is in a bit of an odd place right now. Matter is a confusing mishmash of standards. Security and privacy issues dog the simplest devices. Many people don't even want their toaster online!

For the majority of domestic uses, people want an Intranet of Things. There's little need to have your light-bulbs controlled when you're outside of WiFi range. Similarly, it is probably a really bad idea to have your hydroelectric dam connected to the Internet.

Which brings me back to the Fediverse.

On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to follow @Yellow_Line@Transit_Authority.gov - or even @Bus_Stop_1234@bus_company.biz - that would allow for hyperfocused data getting to the right people. It seems feasible that every civic object could have a Fediverse account. From the individual streetlights to the municipal sewerage system. Perhaps people won't send love letters to overflowing drains - but a social-dashboard of your civic environment could be both practical and delightful.

And, as for your domestic gadgets? Why not give every room, or every light-bulb, in your home a private Fediverse account? You could send a message like:

Hey @thermostat@My_Home.example.com, please set the temperature to 19°C. Thanks!

That might be a bit much! But I like the idea of a private social network which consists of all my IoT gadgets talking to me and each other.

If I moved to a different server, my "birthday" would be irrevocably lost 😢

But… what if I moved to a self-hosted Mastodon instance? Why! Then the database would be under my complete control and I could put whatever data I wanted in there. I could even lie about things!

Surely no one would be that silly though?

The other day I was chatting with someone whose follower count was so high that it temporarily broke my client.

To be clear, the account @admin@mastodon.adtension.com is being deliberately provocative here. I don't think that they expect anyone to believe that they have more followers than the entirety of humanity, nor that they started using Mastodon last century.

This isn't a problem limited to Mastodon and ActivityPub. Twitter controls its own database and could, if it wanted to, inflate follower numbers for insecure people.

And, before you get too excited, this isn't a usecase for BlockChain! In theory, multiple servers could write statistics to a ledger (1,000 people on example.social follow @edent@whatever.social) but they have no way of verifying each others' statistics. So a determined user could have multiple fake instances writing fake data to the chain.

Chasing status is a mug's game. Anyone can hire a sports car for the afternoon and rent a fancy suit - that doesn't mean they're a celebrity. Similarly, anyone can lie on the Fediverse and make you believe they're a social media superstar.

Don't believe the hype!

My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've met. Things like this:

And, I guess we've all got a contact like this, right?

(Sorry, Geoff!)

But there's no way to do that on Twitter or LinkedIn or any other social network I'm aware of.

Wouldn't that be useful? How many times have you stared at a digital acquaintance and wondered "how do I know you? Why do I follow you? Who the hell are you??!"

What I want is a private note field on your social network so I can say "Worked with them on Project X" or "Met at Dave's party. Married to Jon(?)". I'd also like to know why I muted or blocked someone - "Only talks about football" or "Holds the wrong opinion about NeoGeo games."

I wonder if there's a GDPR issue that stops services offering this. I asked on Twitter:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Random data protection question.

Let's say Twitter had a "private notes" field that you could add to users.

Eg "met them at X's party" or "blocked because they were mean about Y" etc.

Would those notes be subject to GDPR requests to Twitter?

---

And got an array of contradictory replies!

Is this something you'd find useful? If so, what's stopping companies from offering it?

The woman was wearing a military uniform - a proper one, not a sexy Hallowe'en costume - and was asking a fairly sensible question of me. But something didn't sit right.

Usually, these accounts have stolen photos and random names. But the name of the account matched the name on the uniform! A bit more digging showed there was a Verified account for the real user - so I reported the fake account for impersonation.

A few months later(!), and Twitter told me they'd removed the fraudulent account.

This got me thinking. How many fake accounts do I follow? How many have been retweeted into my timeline? How many have I interacted with? Surely, by the law of averages, I must have been fooled at least once. Right?

What if Twitter (and Facebook, and MySpace, and TikTok, and Club Penguin) told users that an account they were following has been removed?

Would you like to know that the "celebrity" you were following was actually an unauthorised fan account? How about that the insightful political analyst was really a paid-for propaganda bot?

The idea has some downsides.

There will be False Positives. An entirely innocent account which is removed despite doing nothing wrong. What are the libel laws if Twitter tells you @RealPoliticalAlanayst was deleted for being a bot - when they're not?

Does it diminish your faith in the platform if, once per week, you find out that accounts like @SuperKittensAway were paid to retweet Anti-Vax nonsense into your timeline?

You normally don't notice that you're no longer following a specific account. Does it have a chilling effect on you if people you thought you trusted are suddenly removed?

Is it overwhelming if you regularly get a notification which says "You recently liked a Tweet from @IdrisElbaIsSoFit - we have determined that account was paid for by the People's Front of Judea to promote anti-Roman sentiment"?

What if a user just deletes their account of their own free will. Should you be told?

There are tools which will monitor who you follow - so you can see if a user has been removed. But not the reason why.

With all that said, I think it would be useful if social media told you if accounts you interact with are removed. Whether it is for racism, trolling, propaganda, or malicious intent. Yes, it may reduce your willingness to engage with similar accounts - but that's probably a good thing.

Think I'm wrong? There's a comment box just down there where you can vent your ire.

"What if," the marketing chaps said, "you could see all your notifications in one place!"

Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were in the same list.

It was a lovely idea. And users all proclaimed that was what they wanted. But users lie. And good ideas fail when they come into contact with reality.

People like silos. And they are fine with rapid context switching. And, it turns out, they're happy to learn how to use a dozen different apps.

So we now have Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pokemon, Untappd etc all living in their own little silos. Occasionally cross-contaminating pollinating.

In light of Twitter's talk about turning itself into a protocol rather than an app, I thought I'd take a stab at how I would redesign Twitter. This is based only on my user needs. It is insular and not collaborative.

Here is a three-stage way I'd improve Twitter - and any social network. Then I'll discuss why it won't work.

1. Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?

Imagine you want to follow Clark Kent - ace reporter at The Daily Planet newspaper. On Twitter you have to work out if he's @CK1234 or @ClarkKent_1 or @UpUpAndAway. Does he have a verified tick? Is that a parody account? Is that Clark from Kent, England?

How about if The Daily Planet ran its own federated Twitter server? You just need to follow @Clark@DailyPlanet.info

His content gets syndicated into your feed - so you're not checking yet-another-network - and you're assured you're following a legitimate account.

Similarly @CustomerHelp@hsbc.uk is more likely to be the real customer service provided by your bank.

As an individual, you might choose to run your own Twitter server - just like you run your own blog. Or you might save yourself some hassle and join a communal server - just like you use WordPress.com

2. Channels

I love Clark Kent's off-beat look at the down-town arts scene - but I hate his biased reporting on Superman. Suppose Clark publishes multiple channels - Superman, Arts, Sport, Personal, Keto, etc.

He posts his dieting tips on #Keto (how does he keep in shape?) and his personal rants about the lack of phone-booths on #Personal.

I could choose to follow his "all" channel, or mute his #Superman channel, or only follow his #Arts channel.

He is in control of what he publishes, and I am in control of what I choose to see.

Google+

This is what G+ nearly got right. It let you put people in "Circles" and then choose what to show them. As I said at the time, this is backwards. Clark doesn't know what you're interested in.

Private Channels

Perhaps Clark wants to create some private channels. He has one called #JusticeLeague (WTF?) but he only lets certain people follow it.

This is similar to how I use Facebook. I only have close friends and family on there, and don't post publicly. Yes, I'm aware anyone them could leak my pics to the press, but that's no different to any form of communication. This is light-touch privacy.

3. A Local Twitter For Local People

Channels aren't the only solution to this though.

Local Twitter servers are free to set their own policies. Consider Untappd - a beer-based social network. I can post all my beer-realated musings on there. If you don't care about that, don't syndicate that facet of my personality.

Syndication and Federation are two-way streets. Clark Kent wants to interact on a local Twitter server specific to Metropolis. He also wants to be on a Photos-of-Krypton server.

Clark could choose to have two separate accounts. One where he discusses police brutality in the city, another completely unconnected one for photos of a distant planet. Or, does he want one primary account?

As a strict teetotaler, Clark blacklists all posts from Untappd and other alcohol-based networks.

Why this is doomed to failure.

Laziness. Humans are intrinsically lazy. That's why we invent so many labour-saving devices. Our laziness will capsize this effort in several important ways.

Organisations don't want to run a social network. Would The Daily Planet really set up a Twitter server for its reporters? Maybe - but they'd probably outsource it to a big central provider in the same way they've outsourced their blog to WordPress.

Individuals aren't going to bother doing this - other than a few strange nerds like you and me. So they'll all gravitate to a few big providers.

Those large providers would coalesce and we'd end up with one big social network again.

Humans are too lazy to verify things. Is that Tweet about broccoli causing cancer from a reporter at DailyPlanet.info or DaiIyPlanett.biz? Will users be able to identify trustworthy content any better?

Most people are too lazy to curate their feeds. I have a friend who tweets about the local Cricket Team. I couldn't give a shit about cricket, and wish I could filter out that part of her personality. If she only thought of me and my selfish needs when Tweeting, she'd have the grace to tag every post with #Cricket - then I could mute.

What happens when Clark leaves the Daily Planet to write for LexCorp's blog? Does he lose all his followers? With this proposal, a social network becomes more like email. Would their need to be a mechanism for forwarding follow requests?

Cross-Posting from multiple accounts gets confusing. I automatically syndicate my blog, beer, Instagram, and FourSquare through to Twitter. Should I do it the other way round? Where do people follow me? What's a hub? Where am I?

Even while writing this proposal, I got confused between channels and servers and communities and interactions. Will people bother to learn a new way of socialising? Or will everything just be dumped on the main feed without any curation?

Your Thoughts?

Ignore the technical aspects - for now - I'd like to know whether you think this is the sort of social-media future you'd like to participate in?

I was lucky enough to go to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting a few weeks ago. A perfect opportunity for a photo of me by that famous door.

Being the vain man that I am, I wanted to set it as my avatar photo. But Twitter and other social networks now use circular avatars.

The "10" has been obliterated and part of my head is missing.

So I've created a quick way to preview avatar images to see how they'll look on both squares and circles. It places a simple overlay on top of your image - like so:

Images can be panned around and zoomed using the mouse.

You can play with the demo

This is only a Minimum Viable Prototype - pull requests welcome!

So, when this email arrived, I couldn't wait to give it a go.

Ok, so the email isn't formatted well for mobile - despite the fact that nearly 50% of all emails are read on the phone.

With palpable excitement, I stabbed at the "Learn More" button. I waited with bated breath. Then - I saw the future!

Look at that flat design! Such clean lines! A perfect font! Colour choices which speak directly to my demographic.

Welcome back, MySpace.

I don't understand money. Well, specifically, I don't understand how companies are funded, classify shares, or any of that finance stuff. But, there's something which has been bothering me about the recent sale of some social media properties.

According to some estimates, tumblr has 170 million users.

$1.1 billion / 170 million users is.... double checks workings $6.47 per user.

Err... what? Even if those number are off by 50% - Yahoo have paid the equivalent of just $13 per user.

Now, I realise that $6 - $13 is a lot for some people, especially young people and those without disposable income. But it's not exactly an extravagant amount, is it? If a social network's worth is in selling advertising to users - you would expect said users to have enough income to be worthwhile advertising to.

Take, for example, Facebook. When they sold their shares they raised something like $16 billion and had roughly 901 million users.

Does sums. That's about $18 per user.

These are not huge sums for an individual.

The thing is, it's pretty hard for an ordinary person to buy a share of a company. You usually need to be able to buy a large quantity of shares, pay for a trading account, try not to get ripped off with various fees, and deal with taxes.

The Internet is making this slightly better - but market trading for small people still needs a hell of a lot of disruption. At the moment, I can't simply hand over the $26 I made in babysitting money and own a single share of Facebook.

I appreciate that selling your company isn't just about the money... but it seems that if you do want to raise cash, getting your users to invest may not be the worst idea in the world.

Sure, the transition from "user" to "part owner" may be uncomfortable - but it's not impossible. Look how Co-ops, Building Societies, and other partnerships manage it. Invested users could vote on major decisions, and feel a sense of pride and community in what they were achieving - not to mention the potential for receiving dividends or other forms or returns on their investment.

Take, for example, App.net. Users pay for their accounts on the microblogging service - developers like me pay slightly more. But we're still just sharecroppers tending someone else's plantation. This isn't a criticism of Dalton Caldwell and his team - but just being a customer isn't enough to convince me that the service won't suddenly shut down or follow some dark path.

I want to be an investor - a very small one - in the services I use. I don't want my attention to be sold to the highest bidder on the stock market.

Like I say, I don't really understand how corporate financing works. I'm sure there are lots of problems with my idea. Not least that Goldman Sachs wouldn't make quite as much money.

I sincerely think that Internet-scale companies should look to those with the most emotional investment to provide them with financial investment. Or they will end up selling not just their customers' eyeballs - but also their trust, loyalty, and love.

Take, for example, this tweet and image:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

http://twitpic.com/2dhr3 - Loving #mint09 :-)

---

Well... ok... fun at the moment it was taken, but does it have any use beyond that? On the off chance that I become a subject for scholars in the year 3723, perhaps.

Should some media just be declared ephemeral? The word comes from the Greek εφήμερος – ephemeros, literally "lasting only one day".

Services like SnapChat allow you to send a message to a single recipient, the photo then expires after 10 seconds. Perfect for sending sexually charged images which then vanish into the æther.

That's how it used to be. A photograph had to be handled carefully or it would start to disintegrate.

Can we do this digitally? Of course, bits rarely perish. Neither do they lose any fidelity unless we expressly ask them to. And, yes, anyone can save a pristine copy any time they want.

But, conceptually, it's very easy to create a photo sharing service where the images irreversibly degrade every time they are viewed. Until there's little left but a clump of colours.

Imagine, for a moment, that every time a tourist glanced at the Mona Lisa and then walked idly by, a little bit of the image went with them.

Initially, she would be resplendent.

After a few years, she would be a bit dog-eared.

Eventually, she would succumb to the ravages of time.

We could progressively add more Instagram style filters onto an image until it was last behind a miasma of faux nostalgia. (From Instagram "Improves" Art)

We could degrade video quality, add scratches and blemishes, reduce audio fidelity an introduce the crackle of vinyl. Text could gradually disintegrate.

Perhaps social networks should build in The Right To Be Forgotten - make it a core feature, rather than a law to slavishly follow?

As time passes, gradually reduce the remnants of our past until they slowly fade away. Mere ghosts in the machine.

Broadly speaking, most social networks separate out into a few main groups.

• Eyes - e.g. services like Flickr for pictures and YouTube for moving pictures.


• Ears - e.g. AudioBoo for voices and SoundCloud for songs.


• Feet - e.g. FourSquare for where I am now and RunKeeper for where I have been (running).


• Hands - e.g. Etsy and Github show what I am creating.


• Mind - e.g. Twitter and Facebook for what I'm feeling and thinking, and what I "like".


• Brain - e.g. Coursera for what I'm learning now and LinkedIn for what I'm doing with that knowledge.

I'm sure you can think of many more examples and some rather different (and equally arbitrary) groupings.

So that set me thinking about what else we could share socially. Some of these ideas may already exist (and no doubt I'm not hip enough to know about them).

Touch and Texture

3D printing is already garnering a community around it - Thingiverse, Shapeways, physibles. But what about touch and feel? Companies like Senseg are already able to simulate textures on a touch-screen.

Sharing the feeling of rain falling on your skin, the way your hand drags across a crocodile's scales, or the squeezability of a friendly cat.

Eventually, this leads us down the route of teledildonics - a technology of limited usefulness while it consists mainly of motor speed variations but perhaps of more popularity when we can share very refined haptics.

Smells and Tastes

Despite our best efforts, we haven't found a simple way to encode, distribute, and produce olfactory sensations.

Imagine a site like Untappd - which tracks which beers you're drinking - which allows your friends to experience the smell and taste of your beer.

I've watched with joy as my friends eat the food I've prepared - and laughed helplessly while they try to handle a spicy curry or super-sour sweet. I could use InterFlora to send you some roses - or I could create a personalised fragrance to emanate from your phone whenever I call you.

Bio/Health

My friend Alex Blandford has written about tracking medical conditions with personal technology. Perhaps we don't want our friends to know our body temperature, T-Cell count, or the level of dopamine in our brain - but it might be useful for our doctors. Or maybe social attitudes will change and sharing our body's weight and brain's happiness with the world will become de rigueur.

Sites like Fitocracy check our physical fitness and share it with the world - so why not track our mental health in the same way?

As we experience dramatic emotional reactions, why not share them and their causes? Services like ThisIsMyJam and GetGlue tell your friends what you're doing - but not how intensely you feel it.

We may not always know how we feel, be able to identify the cause of our distress, or understand how to articulate it - a medical implant could silently monitor our brain chemistry and alert our friends if we needed help.

Integration

None of these are a paradigm shift - they are all datapoints which can easily be integrated into our existing social networks. Until we have the ability to directly create memories and sensations in the brain - we may be limited to vicarious enjoyment by proxy.

Many years ago, the next big term was "Social Objects":

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the rea­son two peo­ple are tal­king to each other, as oppo­sed to tal­king to somebody else. Human beings are social ani­mals. We like to socia­lize. [...] There needs to be a rea­son for it to happen in the first place. That rea­son, that "node" in the social net­work, is what we call the Social Object.

Our social objects are only conduits to what we really want to share. When you tell a joke, you want to make people laugh, when you tell a friend to see Les Mis you want them to cry, when you talk about your bowel movements you want them to know how you feel.

What if "checking in" to The Seven Year Itch allowed you to directly share the weird feeling in the pit of your stomach when Marilyn Monroe's skirt is caught in the updraught from an air vent? What if sharing your car's average fuel efficiency of Fuelly allowed your friends to experience the same smugness you do?

When we share, it's not because we love a brand, or a film, or a mere thing - we share because we love our friends and we want to bring them joy and help them understand the journey we're taking.

Maybe that's what's next for social networks.

In the original days of computing, every user had their own computer. Well, Turing had his own computer... Then, everyone had to timeshare on a massive mainframe. Later, every user had their own computer. Now, we're back to mainframes. Sure, we call it "cloud computing" or "thin clients" but it amounts to the same thing.

That's the way technology works. It yo-yos between extremes.

Think about web hosting. Originally, each user had their own web server. Well, Tim Berners-Lee had his own web server... Then, everyone hosted their websites on a few big servers like GeoCities. Later, every user bought hosting from their preferred host & had their own domain name. Now, we're back to hosting our sites on the mainframes, and sharing domain names again. FaceBook and LinkedIn is our new presence on the web.

As we move to IPv6, high speed home Internet, and powerful personal computers, it's not inconceivable that we'll swing back to hosting our own sites.

So what does this mean for social?

We started with no real infrastructure. Hosting our own blogs and guestbooks (man! Remember guestbooks!?!). Then, we outsourced our lives to sites like blogger.com. Later, we self hosted our social lives using WordPress and MoveableType (man! Remember MoveableType!?!). Now, we're in hock to FaceBook, Flickr, and Twitter. They're the massive sites which hold us and our data hostage.

None of this is historically precise - and there's a lot of overlap - but I think it points to a definite trend.

What if the next trend is us hosting our own social networks?

We needed Flickr because storing gigabytes of photos was too expensive. We needed YouTube because transcoding and streaming video was too complicated. We needed Twitter because sending text messages to a website required significant infrastructure. We needed FaceBook because finding our friends' online identities was nigh on impossible. We needed hosted social networks because there was a strong commercial incentive for them to gather us together.

Is that still the case now? I don't think so.

Who's Next?

Here's how I imagine the world...

I own a domain name. I get hosting with it. I have a catalogue of software I can choose from. In this case, Softaculous.

Imagine, instead of WordPress and phpBB - I could install Twitter, or Instagram, or Pintrest.

I am no longer twitter.com/Example - I am twitter.Example.com! FaceBook, Habbo Hotel, Friends Reunited - they're no different to ftp, www, gopher, etc. Just another service to hang off your domain.

Imagine there was no need for data portability - because your data never left your servers.

Imagine never worrying about breaching some nebulous terms and conditions - because the only law that matters is the service's protocol.

Imagine... Imagine...

Decentralised, federated services, running on your hardware, communicating freely, using open standards. No one profiting from owning our data, no one holding us hostage as they grow more tyrannical, no arbitrary changes to terms and conditions.

"Nae King! Nae quin! Nae Laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled agin!"

It's a pipe dream. But I'm not the only one dreaming.

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!