Reid Dossinger

I was thrilled today to see this article  today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly. The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well. But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manag...

There are two rule-type ways of thinking on processes and usability that I've come to believe very strongly in. The first rule is this: the more steps involved in a task, the higher the desire of the user has to be to finish it.  The second rule : if people aren't interested in learning something or lack incentive to learn it, they won't learn it, regardless of intelligence. I've been reminded of both these rules time and time again lately because of Google+'s Circles, which breaks both of these. To be clear, I'm not saying that to use Google+ requires a tech intelligence, or that people are going to reject it because they're lazy. I'm saying that to force users to make categorical decisions for every single person they add on Google+, and to then have to constantly mull over and edit those categories (rule one) when there isn't a compelling reason to do so (rule two) is ultimately going to cost them users.  Don't think of G...