Google+ Circles, I still don’t get it

by jeffhilimire on November 30, 2011

Google+ very well might be the next great thing. I’m really bad at predicting those kinds of things. When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was crazy (come on, admit, so did you). I also thought FriendFeed was going to be amazing (kinda was until Facebook bought it). So I’m no expert in predictions, let’s start with that.

And I’m not dogging Google+ overall, if you get value out of it then I think that’s great. I’m also not a Facebook fanboy (should we be calling that a faceboy?), so its not like I’m a homer for Facebook being the perfect utopia of social goodness. In fact, I’m a huge Google fan. True, I’m an Apple fanboy at heart but I’m also a Google homer. In fact, I switched my phone service to Sprint just so I could use Google Voice.

But no matter how I look at Circles, I just can’t understand why anyone would think it is such a great feature.

True, I ranted about my angst over Google+ Circles before, so perhaps this is a bit of a re-post, but after seeing the latest commercial and continuing to hear people that love Google+ talk about how they love Circles, I have to ask again…why?

I feel like I’m on an island here as I haven’t heard anyone really agree with me about Circles being a flawed concept that, the bigger your circles get, the more useless they will become. MG Siegler seems to be on the same track as me, so there’s one person I’ve found.

Did Google make their way of grouping your friends easier to find than Facebook’s exact same feature? Sure, they absolutely did.

Did they make it fun for about five seconds by letting you drag and drop your friends into a circle? Yep, its a big barrel of fun until you get to your 15th friend and you look at your 200 other friends and realize…this is gonna be painful.

Circles, or however you group your friends, HAS to be dynamic and fluid, not manual. If you’ve spent any time at all putting your friends in Circles you’ve realized this, whether you want to admit it or not. You get to your 80th friend and you’ve got your 6 tidy Circles and then you realize that your 80th friend is also a huge New England Patriots fan and wouldn’t it be great to be able to run a Google+ Hangout during the Patriots game with all your friends who are Patriots fans? So you create a new Circle called, “Tom Brady is our hero”, but then realize, there are at least five other people I’ve already put into Circles that are also Patriots fans. So then you have to go back through all your previous 80 friends to figure out which ones are Patriots fans to put them into that new Circle.

Things change. People change. What happens when several of those friends stop being Patriots fans and become (GASP) Jets fans? You have to manually go and remember that they switched over to the dark side and move them out of the Patriots Circle.

This can happen if people move cities (you might have an “Atlanta” Circle so you can talk about snow storms that never happened), if people move jobs or career tracks, if people get married…all depends on your Circles. Unless you make your Circles so vague that they have almost no meaning.

The entire basis for Circles is flawed. Here’s the dumb part. Nobody, not even Facebook, knows more about us than Google. Google knows what I tweet. Google knows what I search for. Google knows what I blog about.

I personally can’t even imagine trying to take my several hundred friends/connections and figure out how to group them all into a bunch of Circles, not to mention the staff I’d have to hire to constantly check to see if they should still be in those Circles. I quit after about 40 as I realized that the Circle, “Atlanta entrepreneurs”, would change so often that it wouldn’t be worth keeping up with it.

If someone has reasons why I’m missing the point, I’d love to hear them. Honestly, I feel like I’m missing something as so many people think Circles is amazing.

Image from Duct Tape Marketing

 

 

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Tagged as: circles, google, plus

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  • http://merchantstand.com Bob Williams

    You’re over analyzing it. Circles are as simple (or complex) as you want them to be.

    Twitter messages are broadcasts really. We think of followers there, but really the message is public. In a sense, twitter is simple because we can’t get stuck in thinking about who gets to see the message and who doesn’t.

    For most people, Facebook is the same way. They don’t try to segment the message because its work (and they may not know how).

    I think Google+ Circles work best if you keep them at the highest level of your life (family, coworkers, church, etc.) To your point, Google brought the concept forward and they are pushing it as their unique feature.

  • Joe Koufman

    I agree with your point that Circles should be more automated based on Google’s knowledge of you, but I also agree with Bob Williams that Google+ MAKES IT SIMPLE for me to decide who my posts should be sent to vs. having to question if a message I am sending is right for EVERYONE including mom, colleagues, HS buddies, etc.

  • http://www.jeffhilimire.com Jeff Hilimire

    Fast forward to a year from now.  In that time 17 of your co-workers have left for another company.  6 of your “church” friends have relocated or switched churches…

    Did you go back and continuously check to make sure all your circles are up to date, or do you now have groups of people that are not in the right circles?  Did you just post a “Hey guys lets brainstorm a new way to do X” to your co-workers circle and not realize that of the 17 people that left, 2 went to a competing company and are now hearing all the things your company is cooking up?

    Its the manual process of this that just doesn’t work.  It doesn’t scale and it breaks over time.

  • http://www.vladgorenshteyn.com Vlad Gorenshteyn

    First, everyone take a deep breath and watch these two parodies.

    Google Minus Commercial: http://youtu.be/IjrzpC6o7xY

    Google Plus Song: http://youtu.be/nGugj1ym594

    Here’s what I think about Circles: 

    As much as I like timely and relevant messages and messaging, I don’t think Circles was ever intended to be a FRM (friend relationship management) system…at least not as drilled as you’d like it to be, Jeff. 

    I adopted Google+ early so growing my circles was organic and not such a pain in the rear that you’re describing. However, I can see that as G+ scales users will come on board with hundreds of their contacts and will face the unruly task of organizing them. 

    I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible with my Circles strategy. Here’s my list:
    1) Family
    2) Friends
    3) Marketing colleagues
    4) Film colleagues
    5) Music colleagues
    6) Brands
    7) Marketing Content 
    8) News

    I think it’s “ok” if content is public or a few people may not get exactly what they expected. Isn’t that the point of the “social” experience? To distribute information and gather feedback that is not necessarily inside the box…

    I think of it this way: if I’m putting together a party, I don’t have to keep it homogeneous. In fact, I like to mix groups to spice it up and keep the conversation interesting (and avoid redundant stories from filling the air)…frankly how people react to other different people they haven’t met before is interesting to me and tell me a lot about an individual.

    Granted there are projects and topics that must be kept within a small, focused group. in this case, just add them manually or create another circle for that project.

    I don’t think Circles are “amazing” but compared to Facebook’s segmentation interface, Google+ is superior in that regard IMHO.

    From a brand page standpoint, Circles simply do not scale. This is of course until social developers like Wildfire create some sort of an sCRM system. For now, I’ve suggested that community managers organize circles chronologically or campaign-based. eCRM will help tremendously once you can “systematically” sort by demographics and psychographics.

    –my two cents

  • http://twitter.com/dennusdus Dennis van Leeuwen

    I agree, what’s the big deal?  Still don’t see why I should switch to G+

  • Pingback: Facebook still running Circles around Google+ #punintended

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