It would also be good for celebrities who don’t want to fans to their circles one at a time. They could just have a “fans” public circle, and I could add myself to that circle to subscribe to all of their posts.

I think the receiving end filter has lots of merit, but hasn’t been implemented properly yet. This would address Stan’s concern: lots of friends of varying interestingness, none of them self moderate, because they’re human (i.e. lazy). Conceivably Google+ should be able to filter your news feed based on how you tag (circle) your friends in such a way that it does a good job of delivering what’s interesting to you. You’d think in the future you’d be able to pull in anything with an RSS feed into a circle as well, so you could sort and prioritize all the data you consume regardless if it’s officially Google+ generated or not.

The trouble, and this hits a lot of the things Tom pointed out, is that you’re supposed to use circles as an outgoing filter as well, but as a consumer of data you can’t subscribe specifically to an outgoing filter, you can only filter by end source, hoping they’ll filter relevantly to your tastes. That is, I can’t specifically pick Tom’s TF2 circle if I think he only says interesting things about TF2, but likewise as a public persona he can’t know I only care about TF2 stuff and pick me specifically to go in his TF2 circle. Eventually they’ll hopefully allow multiple custom named “public” circles that show up with your profile and create specific RSS feeds (essentially tagging using circles). As an example, Tom could add a public circle called “TF2”, when I search for Tom I see he has a number of public circles, none of which I care about with the exception of his “TF2” circle. I take that and drag it into my “gaming philosophy” circle and I’m good to go.

But after reading your post and the comments, I realized that the success of the Google+ social network then depends on people to self-moderate, which I don’t think the average user is going to do… The success of any system is only as good as its data set, and Google is pretty much banking on the users to categorize their own data. This seems like a flaw to me. Like many of the comments on this thread say, the onus is now on the publisher to discriminate who they broadcast to, and not on the reader to discriminate who they subscribe to. I don’t want to completely eliminate somebody from my newsfeed just because half of what they say is irrelevant to me. I just wish they’d only post stuff to circles I’m in that relates to me.
In an ideal world, Google+’s system is better, but I don’t give humanity enough credit to limit their big mouths.

Another point, is that I don’t know if we’ve given Google enough credit. I think it’s worth it to give it some time to see how their algorithms work. So far, they don’t have a lot of data to work with, so I want to let it get populated and see how it plays out. Who knows? Maybe if John Smith is in my circle x, and he posts something as public, but a lot of mutual friends who also happen to be in my circle x give it a +1, then maybe it will get an improved ranking in my “Circle X” feed, although not necessarily in my primary feed. Of course, I have no idea what Google does… just an example of how the system could be smarter than we’re giving credit for it so far.

I agree that it’s all a bit early to judge yet. It could work, but hard to say yet.

I’m not sure how many people would want things your way; scanning my Facebook feed I have the usual “eating cod…”, “linen is the best material…”, “EDF out in Cambridge”, “big audition…”, “going to the beach…”; that’s how most people use Facebook, to give out general information about themselves, so:

a. I don’t think they’d respond well to your more complicated system – why do I have to sign up to seven Stephen Fry circles, waaah! why do I have to politely sort my comments into different groups, waaah!

b. How would they group comments? – what I’m currently wearing, what I’m currently looking at, how I’m currently feeling…

I think Google understands perfectly that people have more friends than they necessarily want to listen to, it’s just that Google assumes that, the people most people want to hear from most are their close friends, because they assume that most people are just saying “wearing shorts, it’s hot, whoo!” and they’re right about that.

You’re the power user they’re not really looking to court, beyond existing on the system to encourage other users to jump onboard.

Try this. Grab 5 random people off of you’re friends list, and see if you can make an interesting circle for them. + 10 points. + 1 bonus point for every other person that fits that criteria as well.

Some of my favorites categories:

“Loves Fight Club Too Much”
“Exercise Nuts”
“Old Car Owners”
“Likes Ska”

b) want to say things that no one who’s not in that group will hear.

^This is exactly what a considerate person might well want to do for their friends.

Remember when Facebook was the network everyone worthwhile fled to from Myspace? This cycle’s rarely – never? – been about a superior service, it’s about who’s not there yet – the trolls and tweens and corporate advertising operatives and datamining engineers.

To a first approximation everything ever is automatically ‘shown to Google’.

Just saying that there is a target group for this. I just need an actual incentive to migrate, like, other people I want to listen to actually using it.

Namely: if you don’t care who’s reading the things you post, why bother posting to circles at all? If people want to listen to you they will be following you. You can just post things under “public,” and people will hear it — and if they want to keep their “voices from The Internet” and “actual friends babbling about their personal lives” streams separate, they can put you into the former circle and pick which stream they want to view at any given moment.

If you don’t mind your posts being public, there’s no downside to posting them as “public.” Anyone who wants to listen will be able to, and you’re under no obligation to add any of those people to your own circles. THOSE circles can be reserved for the people who you actually want to listen to.

There’s no reason to have, say, a “TF2” group full of everyone you know who plays TF2, unless there’s a reason you a) want to listen to things that group specifically has to say, or b) want to say things that no one who’s not in that group will hear. If it doesn’t serve either purpose, there’s no point in having such a list.

Less sarcastic: I don’t think it’s a great product. I don’t see what need it fills for end-users, particularly now that Facebook has good video-chat built in. Despite the granular control over what you broadcast, it feels that you’re being broadcast at, rather than selecting what you want to read. The circles concept already exists in Facebook as Groups, but it’s not as elegantly or forcefully presented, but now that I’ve lived with Circles for a bit, I think it might be a benefit – my life doesn’t benefit from me arranging the people I know into careful little piles. It’s an over-engineered solution to a human problem.

I think that’s the issue. Plus feels like Google helping itself – it knows that it can deliver better search if it can deliver social search. So to do that, it needs a social product. But as a user, I don’t care about Google’s aims – I just want a place to hang-out online where Ross will post funny videos of dogs running around with fireworks in their mouths.

Finally; I think Facebook is way too good now. Not big; it’s not big enough until everyone with an electronic device is signed up. Just good; it floats the stuff I care about to the top, it is pervasive across the web, it feels real-time but is actually algorthmically managed, and it’s fun.

However, the question is whether or not people understand this, and if they do understand this, will they self-moderate this way? James, you make a very good point, you currently really have no recourse to filter your own stream other than “by person”. The onus is all on the poster to make sure they post only to people who they think will enjoy the content. This fails completely for three groups of people: those who are too famous to know all of their listeners, those who want to use the service just like twitter and make everything public, and those who only restrict viewership only to “protect” information (rather than for the benefit of the subset of their friends who don’t care about TF2 for example).

I think having some sort of tagging / ranking system would improve the situation greatly, as well as having a way to view posts from more than 1 circle at once (but not all of them!).

Like, you can filter your stream to view posts from a specific circle, but can’t tag circles to not show up in your stream. You can, of course, just assemble one circle of everyone you actually want to pay attention to, and then just watch your stream through that…but you have to do this manually, and can’t just shift-click circles and assemble them into a group.

I don’t think there’s anything to be done about #2, in any system ever: if you want the people you talk to and listen to to be different, you’re, uh, going to have to make two different lists of people. But, at least at present, there don’t seem to be tools to quickly duplicate circles, or merge them, or split them, or show a sort of “ven diagram” of people who are in multiple circles, or add people to multiple circles simultaneously, or group circles into groups you can use for posting or streamfiltering.

For #3, some sort of post-tagging system would be quite useful. But that’s in the same category of “stuff that would be cool and useful to have but isn’t implemented yet.”

For #4…this is another thing that’s kind of inherent to any privacy system. If you want to keep something private, you have to trust that the people you share it with won’t pass it along the gossip-train. This is not a thing that any social network structure will solve! Though, that said, there are issues with Google+’s implementation — but again, they’re things like not having an easy way to see the full list of people a post is shared with, or to search that list, or quickly and easily compare it to one of your circles.

I’ve never run into #5. As far as I’ve experienced it, the default circles a post is shared to are whichever you left enabled the last time you went to post something. This might be a bug? Hmm.

. . .

Anyways: I think Google+ has done a pretty good job at nailing down a good structure for a social network. The problem is that using this structure easily requires a set of tools that they haven’t supplied yet. Or made yet, really. I do get a bit annoyed at all the railing about it being “counter-intuitive,” though: what, exactly, is counter-intuitive about it? You make lists of people. Once you have a list, you can post posts to them, or look at a feed of what that list has to say. The system doesn’t “make assumptions” about anything: it’s you, as the user, who are making said assumptions when you put together your lists. If you want to do one thing with one set of people and another with another set, this is a thing that requires two lists.

But most of the complaints I hear aren’t “ugh, I am trying to set up my circles and there’s no way to do %thing without doing it by hand, and I can’t just do a quick search for this or accomplish that fairly simple operation with one button press.” (Which are all totally reasonable complaints.) Instead, it’s all “Whaaat, this system is weird and confusing and stupid,” and I struggling to figure out the perspective people are approaching this from that it does not make sense.

1. Google+ is a stupid name for a social networking site.

and 2. That screenshot you posted looks exactly like Facebook. If I hadn’t clicked on the screenshot to see the little “+1” Facebook-esque Like function I wouldn’t have even known it was done on Google+.

I guess I’m cynical, but how exactly are they hoping to stand out from the 600+ million users Facebook has? Aside from the people who just can’t get enough of social networking from the safety of their own homes, who are they hoping to attract with this? The people who hate Facebook’s most recent updates and so they go to the nearest clone in protest?