[joebadmo]

Griping about an optional feature? Really?

Circles have great utility for me for two reasons.

1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things.

2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people.

If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them completely.

I will never ever ever trust an algorithm to get this right, except for the most trivial cases, and if the case is that trivial, I will default to public.

I think ultimately the problem is that these features are trying to replicate offline social context, but only getting halfway there. I've written more about this: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-perfo...

[bodegajed]

Optional? I don't think so. Google Circle _is_ the main feature. That's everything Google+ is about.

[joebadmo]

Circle management is optional. If you want to use it like Twitter, you can. Just dump everyone in one Circle and spray your content indiscriminately to everyone in it.

[Tyrannosaurs]

The point is that to use this feature (which is potentially a great feature) requires you to do shit work.

Yes it's an optional feature and people can not use it but frankly the whole product is optional and people can not use it.

If you're going to put a feature in your product then you should do so in a way that makes it as good as it can possibly be - and that includes reducing the associated shit work.

[strager]

> Just dump everyone in one Circle

To me, this is shit work (that the author was talking about).

[joebadmo]

Then you've never actually done it. It's two clicks. You're just looking for something to complain about.

[kelnage]

But you don't need to use every Circle - you can dump everyone you know in one Circle and leave it at that.

I've got to say, this is very much a complaint that doesn't appear to have a good solution. Beyond any sort of simple AI that groups based on last name, school or employer (like Facebook does, I guess), there's not much to go on when it comes to automatically creating Circles.

[nl]

Ummm. No.

I use Google+ heavily and I've put everyone in the same circle.

It's a great marketing feature though!