[unreal37]

I think G+ needs to clarify whether it's aimed at "only real friends" as Facebook is, or aimed at "mainly people you don't know" a la Twitter. Once they clarify that, people will stop posting vacation photos for strangers to see, or stop posting Lisp programming tips to their personal friends.

[vito]

Isn't it the whole point of Circles that they don't have to clarify that? You're in complete control of who you send things to from the very beginning, and the only way you can add people is by putting them in the appropriate circle(s).

[spullara]

The whole thing is somewhat inside out. People should probably expose the things they are going to talk about and users decide what they want to hear from them. You could then make a topic protected or public. Protected would allow the broadcaster to accept / deny subscribers to that topic. Still too complicated but it would at least give people the control they think that circles provides but doesn't.

[kisielk]

But that puts the onus on the sender not to spam people who may not be interested. There needs to be more control for the receiving end.

[kin]

Yeah, people are sharing wrong. If one person posts Vacation photos, they should post it to their Friends circle, while their Tech posts can be public posts. But, to be honest it's one more thing for people to do and is the reason why there's no fine-tuning of noise.

[btilly]

No they are not sharing wrong, the system is broken.

Google+ offers many ways for me to target content to a group of people that I personally know, and only one, "Public", to distribute content to anyone who might be interested.

Unfortunately there are at least 3 common use cases that need to be considered:

1. I target a message to people I think are interested. (Google+ does this well.)

2. I broadcast a message to people who may be interested. (Google+ sucks at this.)

3. A group of people forms for some purpose (work, game, whatever), and needs to be able to communicate within that group. (Google+ has no support at all for this, and the result is that I was forced to go to Facebook to communicate with people I was playing a Google+ game with.)

There is a real need for all three modes, and I don't know of anyone who does all three well.

[toyg]

I agree that point 3 is still a very big omission. They must be trying hard to merge this "Group" feature into their Circles metaphor, and failing for some reason or other. I personally can't see how hard it could be to add special Circles which are shared by multiple people but managed by only a specific few, but I don't know anyone at Google working on G+.

[kin]

My post implied that the system is broken, so I do agree with you.

As cumbersome as it is, the solution to 3 would be to have everyone in a circle create the exact same circle.

[shadgregory]

Why didn't you tell me you hated my Lisp tips! :(

[SkyMarshal]

Love your Lisp tips, not your lolcats!