[Permit]

When Google+ released, I remember being somewhat confused that they opted for user defined Circles rather than using user relations as a gauge for friend "closeness". As the author of this blog post points out, users almost never want to get stuck placing hundreds of people in groups that could change at any time.

In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line: "Although users of online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit groups."

I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.

[1]Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...)