One of the biggest advantages of social media-style communication is the ability for your audience to choose itself rather than for you to assume interests and choose the audience yourself, likely leaving out people that would be interested.
The standard line is that Circles is more about organizing the people you know the way you would "in real life", but do we really silo people that much in real life? When we choose our social companions in the real world, we stop because we have to, not because we've exhausted the list of people we want to talk to and be around.
Anyone who's started a blog knows the surprise in finding that the people who read it religiously are the people you never would have thought would be interested, while many of those people that you thought would read every word never look at it. Likewise with Facebook, where many of the people I interact with are old friends from the past who have turned out to be surprisingly funny and interesting, whereas closer friends are never to be heard from.
The flip side of this is email, where every "To" box requires you to decide who your audience is. That's all fine and well when you just need to get through to one person, but when sending information to larger groups, how do you know you're not leaving out the people who would be the most interested, the most likely to be able to help you?
So what Google has made with Circles is social media that acts like email. They're asking you to carve up your life into particular groups and then decide who gets to see what you're sharing, when, in fact, you don't really know who would be interested and who wouldn't, no matter how well you know the people.
The standard line is that Circles is more about organizing the people you know the way you would "in real life", but do we really silo people that much in real life? When we choose our social companions in the real world, we stop because we have to, not because we've exhausted the list of people we want to talk to and be around.
Like with books and music, Circles is another attempt to force our long-standing ways of doing things into a digital world where the possibilities are so much greater. Our real life social silos are created out of the limitations of the physical, and if Google really wants to "fix" social sharing, then attaching those limitations to a digital product is the wrong way to go about it.
Here's what I think should be done instead: the model suggested by the multiple personalities that are part of having multiple Twitter accounts; basically that you compartmentalize yourself and your friends and followers decide which parts they want to see. You set up the different parts of your personality as Circles (ie, Music Geek, Developer, Politically Opinionated, Nightlife, Family-Friendly, etc) and then when you post, you pick which Circles to post to, much in the way it is now.
Where it differs is that, rather than you selecting your friends and putting them in different circles of yours, they decide which parts of you they want to hear about when first adding you as a friend. And when they add you as a friend, you can choose to block different Circles for that particular friend, so if your boss selects the "Nightlife" circle of yours, you can block that part and have him/her continue to see the Family Friendly Circle. That requires maintenance, of course, but less than the current method, and it just makes more sense for social sharing.
Our personalities have different parts, yes, but I don't understand why social networks seem to think that the people we know can be neatly defined and divided by groups. There's better ways.
Our personalities have different parts, yes, but I don't understand why social networks seem to think that the people we know can be neatly defined and divided by groups. There's better ways.
Interesting refinement on the concept. I think the headline is a bit of a troll ... circles are still a useful evolutionary step for me. But I like your enhanced version better. Channels?
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ReplyDeleteA fair enough criticism, considering how often I complain about headlines that pronounce the "death" of some technology. But it's sincere, and a reference to the official Google line of "online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it." Circles it their answer to fixing it how sharing is done, and I think it does absolutely nothing to make sharing any better at all. In fact, I think it does the opposite: it makes us limit our audiences in ways that are ultimately terrible for sharing.Channels is a good way of looking at it, I guess. It's what I do in Tweetdeck, but the problem there is that I have to have completely different accounts, where I think exactly the same thing could be done in one account.
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ReplyDeleteI know some people get awfully tired of seeing my fb and twitter posts about hockey, but still want to see what I have to say about music or whatever, so your idea is a great one. Not much maintenance. You just file the post under "dining" or "soccer" or whatever. Your audience won't see your post if they don't subscribe to your "soccer" posts. I like it.
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