[danso]

The author seems to be missing a gigantic point of order here. The reason why Facebook is algorithmically able to determine groups for you is because you, the user, have already entered in fields for Work, School, Location, etc. So the user has had to do a small amount of shit work for Facebook to do its magic.

Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing friends into circles. But G+ does not (yet) have the same kind of parsed personal/profile information, which would require the same mechanism that FB has (deciding who to reveal what parts of your profile to)...and which, as far as I can tell, is not trivial to implement, or to graft on to the existing Google Account structure.

Of course, Google can ALREADY do this for you. No doubt they have mined enough information about each user, including locations of IP addresses, to fill out most of your boilerplate profile info. It doesn't take the EFF to realize the privacy implications of auto-filling your circles with people who don't realize that Google's algorithm has correctly guessed their location, age, school and workplace and is now implicitly exposing such information.

[Timothee]

I think that the part where entering your info into Facebook appears less like shit work is that it's typically factual and structured: I worked there, I studied here, these people are family members.

Google +'s circles are completely up-to-you, for better or for worse, and you hit ambiguous parts more quickly: is that guy a friend or an acquaintance? Should I put him in "Tech", "Ruby", both?

But of course, as you go deeper in either product, you'll soon find the same ambiguities and amount of shit work.

[danso]

No disagreement there...I think it's just extremely difficult for Google+ to do auto-circling without either:

a) Creating a Facebook-like profile system, with more regimented fields and discrete data.

b) Totally disregarding users' privacy by doing it for them.

All of these are technically possible for Google, but they also have their major drawbacks. Where Google has been able to do it without downside - your private list of closest GMail and GChat contacts - it has.

[Torn]

> But of course, as you go deeper in either product, you'll soon find the same ambiguities and amount of shit work.

The point here is that for facebook when your contacts change their details, changes to their inclusion in your groups are automatically cascaded.

It's orders of magnitude less shitwork than Google+ where you have to manually curate / update circles.