Fun with Circles in Google+

Circles are annoying, because it’s a step back to the Xing, LinkedIn and forum era, where we all had multiple faces: one for business, one for our hobby, one for our former classmates and one to pull girls or guys. Facebook glued all our faces together to one. In Facebook I am the tanguero, who writes novels and essays, engages in open source communities and the pirate party and makes a living with copywriting and advertising. Or in Facebook I am the advertising specialist, who likes to dance tango, writes novels and essays and engages in open source communities and the pirate party. You can look at me from different angles, but you always look at me, the entirety of Me. This is much more interesting than my aseptic business profiles on Xing and LinkedIn. Is there really only one headhunter out there, who enjoys reading the boring profiles and updates on these platforms?

Facebook discloses the whole personality. This is thrilling. Therefore everybody one Facebook is either a friend or not a friend. And every friend is equal: perfect privacy communism. This is revolutionary and made Facebook such a big success.

This is mind changing. Some days ago someone from the other side of this planet, whom I accidentally added as friend, because I am curious to meet new people, claimed to be my brother in Facebook. In my timeline I saw that he claims to be the brother of all his friends in Facebook. Consistent, I thought. Facebook friendship is kind of a religion. We are all friends, we are all brothers and sisters. When I post a message in Facebook, everybody can read it as if he is my brother sitting right next to me. If you don’t like it, leave it.

Google+ Circles seems to be a step back, because you can fine-tune the privacy options of every posting. You can post private pictures to your closest friends without anyone the wiser.

But if people think of Circles as a privacy feature, Google+ will fail. It is annoying to mind privacy each time you post something. If you do, you will stop posting at all or censor yourself. If I mind privacy when I post a picture, I have not only to select the right circle but also to examine the circle carefully, because privacy is private. I may be concerned that this special person sees or reads something about me, which I don’t want him to see or read. So people will cry for a feature sending to a circle excluding a person, who happen to be in the circle. This is mad!

Think of circles as the subject of your message and you will discover the strength of this feature. You know this from usenet and mailing lists. You don’t read messages with a boring or meaningless subject. But if there is a subject that catches your interest, you click on it and read the whole message.

Something very similar happens in Google+ with circles. Someone puts you in a circle, because he thinks that you are interested in reading his »private« messages or his messages on eg. »python programming«. Your timeline is filled by messages your contacts think are interesting for you.

So if you create your circles don’t mind privacy too much but think of subject circles, project circles, workgroup circles. One example. When I post a link to an interesting website about the programming language Python, I’ll post it to my Python-circle. But when I find an interesting resource for the PSF Python brochure, I am working on, I’ll post the link to the project team only. And when I want to discuss, whether the call for papers for the Pycon DE should be extended, I’ll chat or hang out with the PyconDE-circle.

Circles make it easy to create ad-hoc communication channels for any given purpose. With Google+ we have a tool that might fulfil what Wave promised: an omnipotent communication and collaboration tool which replaces email, forums, microblogging, messaging, chat and video conferencing. Keep in mind that Google might integrate Google+ and Cirlces into Google Docs and Google Calendar later this year.

Superfluous to say that if Google+ succeeds – we all have a problem, because then Google will swallow the whole internet.