[drivebyacct2]

Don't like Lists? Don't use them. I have almost a dozen lists on Facebook and I use them extensively (as if they're Circles basically). The only annoying thing is that Facebook decides to change my default publication privacy every time I publish to a specific list.

I don't understand, are the features themselves bad? Who's forcing you to use Twitter lists, or Facebook lists, or even Circles?

[lmkg]

I think you're reading the article from the wrong perspective. The author isn't speaking to the people using these features, he's speaking to the people making these features. From a user's perspective, you are absolutely correct. People can simply ignore features. In fact, many people do. From a developer's perspective, that's the problem: many people are not using the feature that you made. If people aren't using the feature, then it was a waste of time to implement it. The post is providing guidance towards making features that actually get used, and were therefore not a waste of time.

[mrclark411]

I would agree - none of the companies in question forces a user to do this type of work. Only enhances the product if that's how you want to use it.

[nchuhoai]

the point he is making is that users shouldnt have to do this work. The circle feature implies that they will automatically will take care of it when in fact it doesnt. It's a lot of manual labor as he elaborates.

[mrclark411]

Why didn't Google+ import from Google Contacts? I have done a fair bit of organizing there. I would communicate similarly on Google+ as I do by email.

[drivebyacct2]

So, it's not magic because it can't read my mind, thus it's a bad feature because it takes work to fully, fully utilize? I guess I'm still missing the point. It'd be nice if Google knew my relationship with these people or somehow knew my best friends from my colleagues or tech interests, but that's asking a bit much.

[drumdance]

It's a suboptimal feature. Most developers like to write code that gets used a lot (at least I do). If a feature that you hoped will be popular is only used by a tiny subset, then you probably failed.

In Facebook's case, they may have written the initial lists feature as way to show they're "doing something" about privacy, so simply deploying the feature is a win.

But in Google's case, they've made Circles a central feature of their platform and it's coming up short (so far at least).

[jasonbarone]

Google (or any network) could make it easier for us to use the feature. Facebook has figured this out and actively has some features to help.

The main ones that come to mind are the ability for other people to create relationships, whether personal or work related. This eliminates some of the work when building your profile. Then Facebook implemented the auto-grouping of lists depending on employers, previous interaction, locations, etc. And lastly, they monitor your graph on a daily basis and serve up possible additions to your friend lists which can be added with a simple click.

Google could have done a little of this using Google data such as Gmail lists and all, but they haven't (yet). Personally, I think Facebook's lists and grouping feature is far superior and I'm actually finding out from non-technical friends that they're actually using the friend lists. I suppose this has to do with Facebook automatically pushing a number of default lists to users...

[nchuhoai]

It's not a bad feature, it's just not as good of a feature as it can be to accomplish that task

[equalarrow]

Yah, I agree, I don't think these features are at all bad. People just don't use them because they're lazy.

The hard problem is to figure out how to machine categorize this stuff, for sure. But I don't think it's shit work on your users to give them the categorize features. This stuff takes a lot of machine learning and a big system graph that hints at how this stuff should be applied. I think calling it shit work is over simplifying..