[lukev]

But, but... I like putting my friends into Venn diagrams.

Seriously. The 1 click it takes to put someone is a circle isn't really "work", and if it saves me awkward calls from my mom because she read a post intended for my drinking buddies, then it was well worth it.

[dylangs1030]

I agree. But the author is making a point about how justified these features are and how arbitrary they can be for users. Personally, I never distinguish who I publish statuses too. But I can understand why that's a useful feature. And he DID praise that feature for Facebook.

What he isn't praising is when a user compulsively uses a feature which is superfluous. A huge assortment of different tags and labels in email isn't really justified. Sure, you can find a use for it. But most users arguably organize their entire mailbox into these neat categories, and thereafter, half of them are never used again.

[lukev]

I know people who are compulsive about having a clean Gmail inbox, and who derive lots of value from tags. I also know people (like me) who are perfectly ok having 10k messages in their inbox, and searching for stuff as required.

The nice thing is, Gmail supports both of these use patterns equally well.

Ideally, that's how every product should treat it's more advanced features. If a user spends the time creating taxonomies they'll never use, well, that's more the user's fault than the software's...

[brown9-2]

I think you're missing the point. You now need to maintain that circle and groupings over the next years you use Google+.

[asdfasdf3]

Check out Nokia Pulse. It's pure Venn, nothing more, nothing less.