“We’re incredibly adept at knowing the right situations to include the right people. They’re not black or white rules and depend heavily on context: is it a party, who else is there, do they know any of the other people, have you talked recently, etc. Unfortunately, this skill and these implicit social rules we know are not easily translated.
kev/null: Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends?
Twitter’s Kevin Cheng does a great job here of crystalizing a lot of my own half-formed thoughts about Google+’s Circles feature (as expressed in tweets like this and this). My hunch, based on my experience with less ambitious systems like Flickr’s privacy levels, multiple Twitter accounts, and Twitter lists, is that even if people are willing to do the work of categorization up front, even if they’re able to fragment their posting identity, and even if they’re able to consistently deal with the somewhat abstract business of determining who will see what, they are unlikely to actively maintain their categorization scheme in a way that reflects shifting social nuances over time. I don’t fault Google at all for their thoughtful attempt to deliver us from Facebook hell (and, frankly, I’ve never liked Facebook either so maybe I’m just not the target audience) but I can easily imagine Google+ becoming it’s own kind of hell in a year or two year’s time.
