Why I Wish Google Circles Were Reversed

For years social networks have been trying to digitally duplicate the complex analog properties of relationships. MySpace had a “Top 8″ to signal your closest friends. It was fun, but it was signaling only. Facebook finally allowed grouping to mimic your analog life’s partitions, but it was cumbersome to use. Meanwhile, Twitter stumbled on an important aspect that Facebook had ignored: asymmetric relationships (Facebook has since created a “subscription” feature). But tweets are still either all private or all public.

Facebook and Twitter each had unique pros and cons, and it seemed like Google tried really hard to create the ultimate social network by beefing up the pros while toning down the cons. Google Plus allowed asymmetric relationships, and it used Circles to make the partitioning as easy to set up as possible. The main drawback is that even the most beautiful UI can’t remove the drudgery of manual partitioning. In the analog world, “Acquaintances” and “Friends” are continually shifting along a continuum, but Google Plus needs me to pick an arbitrary cut-off point and continually update when people switch sides. I have plenty of Facebook friends that I hardly see at all these days – and that’s just a binary connection. Surely the more I refine my Circles into “Friends” and “Co-workers” (HN Circle? Technology? Politics?), the more entropy they will suffer.

But let’s assume that precisely maintaining your Circles isn’t a problem for you, or that Google finds an algorithmic way to prompt you to keep them updated. There’s still a glaring inconsistency with how Google is trying to combine the privateness of Facebook with the publicness of Twitter.  Like Twitter, you can publicly post things on Google Plus and be followed by people you don’t know. But if you try to start partitioning your posts for privacy like Facebook, you run into problems. Putting people in Circles only works for people you know. And the whole point of asymmetric relationships is that you can connect with people you don’t know because they are interested in what you have to say.

I have things to say about lots of topics. Some people might only be interested in some of them, but I have no idea what circles to put them in. Since my Google Plus connections are pretty much all tech-related, I’ve taken to only posting about technology there. But what if Google Plus takes off in the mainstream and my family and non-tech friends start joining? I don’t want to spam them with posts about coding and SEO and start-ups, but if I tag all those posts as “Technology” posts so they never see them, then no one else browsing my profile will ever see them either. That’s not the best of both worlds; I either have to keep everything public so people can discover me (no better than Twitter), or I have to partition things, which means my posts aren’t public and people can’t discover me (no better than Facebook).

Circles are great if you want to volunteer sensitive information about yourself to an online database and then try to hide that information from certain people. But Circles are terrible if you want to publicly share things with people you don’t know. I don’t want to decide what I want every one of my connections to see from me. I want every one of my connections to decide what they want to see. And that’s why I wish Google Circles were reversed.

I want to make almost all of my posts Public, giving linkjuice votes to the things I share and filling my profile for people who don’t follow me yet. But I want to give these posts categories. Then potential followers could look at my page and see my posts about Music, Technology, Politics, or Religion. They could add me and decide which posts of mine they wanted to see. If they ever got tired of a certain category, they could freely change it. I wouldn’t have to spend any time worrying about who was interested in what I was posting, because then the people with that information would actually have the ability to act on it.

I could post more about politics, or technology, or any other interest of mine, than I do on Facebook because friends that don’t want to see it could turn those categories off, while the acquaintances who leave those categories on could benefit even though I had no idea they would have wanted to be in those Circles. And I could post more about all these topics than I do on Twitter because people I don’t know could just follow me for whatever topics they did want. We would all be free to indulge in our hobbies and niches without bothering our families and close friends. We would have a sensible way to combine the privateness of Facebook with the publicness of Twitter.

Of course, there is still a need for private posting. When I have my first child, I will want to only share those pictures with specific people I have chosen to be connected to. The fundamental issue is that analog relationships have two ends. First I decide whether I want to share this with everyone or a select few – but then those on the receiving end decide whether or not they want to receive it. Google Circles is the best attempt yet at taking care of the first aspect, but it is woefully inadequate on the second. I don’t know if it’s possible to handle both ends in the digital world without complicating things even further, but I hope Google – or the next social network – can figure out a way.