[brentjanderson]

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

[saubeidl]

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

[throwawayq3423]

It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.

[danlugo92]

IG and others have similar functionality nowadays at least.

[kevml]

Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.

[positron26]

Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.

[throwawayq3423]

> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.

Then it wasn't a good feature.

[positron26]

The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.

[andai]

That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."

[dghlsakjg]

This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.

[spauldo]

Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.

I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.

That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.