[joshuahedlund]

I can't find them right now, but I remember reading a blog post or two complaining that manually dividing your contacts into Circles (and maintaining those Circles over time) was bad/useless busy work to force on users. I wonder if this Volume thing will feel like just another micro-managing necessity that makes it worse.

But I'm glad to see that they've added lots of features - like multiple admins for brand Pages, which was a big complaint during the recent brand Page rollout. Google is clearly listening to its users and trying hard to compete in the crowded social network environment.

[bad_user]

I read the same article and it was flawed for a reason - it isn't busy work if you don't use it. You can just have 1 or 2 circles - like Family and the rest of the world.

It is extremely useful however if you want multiple channels of communication. Say, you want to post news for Ruby developers and you do that daily ... so why on earth would you want to spam your friends that aren't even developers? On the other hand posting pictures of your child should be for close acquaintances only - friends, colleagues from school / work, family, otherwise if you get popular you'll regret exposing your personal life ;)

A feature is busy work as long as you don't need it. As soon as you need it however, it becomes indispensable. Also, this particular problem cannot be solved by either ignoring it or solving it algorithmically.

[judofyr]

> It is extremely useful however if you want multiple channels of communication. Say, you want to post news for Ruby developers and you do that daily ... so why on earth would you want to spam your friends that aren't even developers? On the other hand posting pictures of your child should be for close acquaintances only - friends, colleagues from school / work, family, otherwise if you get popular you'll regret exposing your personal life ;)

That's actually one of the weakest part of G+: I can't post something that's both public and limited to one audience. If I post Ruby stuff publicly, I'll spam my friends; if I don't publish it publicly, nobody will know I post Ruby stuff.

[joshuahedlund]

This is why I wish Google Circles were reversed. The current method is fine if you actually have stuff you want to post to a public database but still hide from your boss. Otherwise it's only fine if you know exactly what kind of content every single one of your followers wants to see from you.

I would much rather be able to mark all of my posts as "Technology" or "Music" or "Politics", where they are all publicly viewable from my page but my followers decide which kinds of categories they want to see from me in their feed. Let the end user control what they consider 'spammy' - not the source user who doesn't know what the end user wants to see.

[bad_user]

Yes that's true - the feature was probably considered too advanced and "busy work", because these days anything that's not just a simple button labeled "press me" is considered too complex.