[sssparkkk]

So, how are these hackers sharing their technical insights on G+ without bothering their real-life friends and family?

That's right, they aren't.

Unless you manually add all your followers to a 'followers' circle and share to that (and subsequently pollute your default stream with your followers' posts) there's currently no way on G+ to keep your technical public persona apart from your more personal, private one.

[wccrawford]

Is that really a concern? For now, their friends and family can ignore any posts they don't care about, just like Facebook.

Hopefully, G+ will eventually implement tagging and people can filter out tags they don't like.

[jqueryin]

I, too, believe this is a problem. My idea of circles is to segregate them into different, private sectors. I currently face this problem on Facebook and Twitter. I tend to use Facebook for only personal friends and family whereas I use Twitter for networking and technology. Ideally I would use both of these networks for both purposes, but there is no easy way to promote separation and ensure that my messages/tweets go to the right parties.

I have no drive to create separate accounts for each social network. My personal preference would be to have different façades publicly viewable to different groups. I would treat Facebook very differently if I was given the opportunity to separate these groups and target them individually. I have a belief that Facebook tried to accomplish this with groups but fell short on exactly what I've been waning for.

As an aside, there is a Hacker News group for those of you who may not be aware.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/114326995294656?ap=1

[sssparkkk]

Of course it's a concern, it's a problem circles were supposed to resolve. I for one am still barely sharing anything, because I don't want to bother people with posts that I know will not be interesting to them.

And yes, tagging would be nice as well, but I don't think one should have to explain to his/her mother to filter out their #tech and #business posts. That just won't work.

[wccrawford]

So in other words, Circles are backwards from Twitter, and this is a problem.

I guess G+ needs a mechanism to allow people to ask to subscribe to a Circle, and the owner can approve or deny it. (Or set an option to auto-allow.)

That keeps the privacy aspect, but also makes it easy for people to follow or be followed.

If that happened, then the circles themselves would become the tags.

Another post here on HN talks about Circles not being Groups. (The Zuckerberg one.)

Reposting my comments from there:

I would definitely like to see Google add groups as pseudo-people... And then you can put that group in a Circle and share to it.

People in the group can see who else is in the group. Groups could be curated (need approval to join) or just open to anyone, and moderated (need approval to post) or not depending on the choices made by the group owner.

[ccarella]

I have a very early stage startup called Subjot, with a goal to create a network that matches people with the posts they care about. We are in private beta but you can use this invite code to check it out - http://sjot.it/m0bqQy

Subjot is a microblogging site where you assign subjects to your status updates. Then instead of following people and EVERYTHING they post, you subscribe to people's subjects and only see their status updates in the subjects you have subscribed to.

I'd love everyone's feedback on the product. I think G+ is only solving the problem of selectively publishing and not of selectively subscribing to updates that might be interesting to you.

[suhailsherif]

The easiest way to correct this would be to allow posting to intersections, disjunctions of circles. It's gonna come for sure.

[dfxm12]

In all honesty, if these people really care about this, they'll have an account for their "online personality" and a personal account.

See the difference between Facebook fan pages and actual Facebook profiles. Of course, now the problem is that there is no elegant way (currently) to manage 2 G+ accounts...

[wisty]

I've always though that personae-based would be better than circle-based. You could even have people like the former _why who have an entirely separate online presence.