[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.