Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends?

parislemon:

As opposed to a silly and pointless argument as to why Twitter needs to be more like Google+, Kevin Cheng (who happens to work at Twitter), has a really excellent look at Google+’s key feature: Circles.

Cheng gives both positives and negatives about Circles. But overall he seems skeptical not just about Circles, but the whole idea of attempting to organize people online using tools. This is similar to Paul Adams’ (formerly of Google, now of Facebook) thoughts. And this rings true to me.

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot lately as well. And while I’m far from drawing any clear conclusion, my initial thoughts are that grouping seems to work well for mobile, ephemeral states. This is why group messaging works, and why I think something like Color, while poorly executed, is interesting.

Trying to create explicit groups for you entire social graph and being forced to maintain them just doesn’t seem tenable to me. Some people may think it is now because something like Circles offers a nice-looking tool, but I think as time goes on, they’ll stop maintaining as well.

Agreed again. I put together some Facebook lists. Never maintained them. I put together some Google+ Circles, which I know I also won’t maintain. Eventually, I just give up and start sharing everything with everyone. It’s too difficult to remember who’s in which group and to change who you’re sharing this post with before you post it and blah blah blah…it’s not worth the time.

My basic rule is - if I don’t want the whole world reading it, I don’t post it online. Seems to work pretty well.

Source: parislemon