Google+, Signal, Noise and The Limitations of Circles

For the last cou­ple of days I’ve been strug­gling with how best to post on Google+. Up to now the major­ity of my posts have sim­ply been sent out to Pub­lic, mean­ing that any­one can see it. The only excep­tions so far have been posts for my fam­ily. But I’m a mod­er­ately heavy poster to my social net­works. Most days I post between 15 and 25 items a day and I post on a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent top­ics, though I do try to keep my re-shares rel­a­tively low to avoid too much rep­e­ti­tion for people.

While my out­put on its own is not that out­ra­geous, I’m con­scious that peo­ple fol­low­ing me may be look­ing for par­tic­u­lar con­tent and my out­put on top of every­thing else they are fol­low­ing may well become over­whelm­ing once the G+ flood­gates are opened wide.

Using Cir­cles

One solu­tion to this would be to sort every­one into cir­cles based on their inter­ests and send my posts directly to those cir­cles. This would dra­mat­i­cally reduce the noise in my stream for every­one I had placed in a cir­cle, but has the prob­lem that any­one who was fol­low­ing me and who I do not have in the rel­e­vant cir­cle. Peo­ple would have to con­stantly let me know of their inter­ests and there would be ongo­ing main­te­nance of the cir­cles. This seems impractical.

Even worse would be the lack of activ­ity in my pub­lic stream. If I’m post­ing all this stuff to a SciFi or TV cir­cle then there’s noth­ing going to the main pub­lic stream so there’s no rea­son for any­one new to fol­low me.

It’s clear that cir­cles as they cur­rently stand are not designed for this func­tion.  The would work for a small group of friends or col­leagues, but not for a larger group of  “followers”.

Pub­lic Circles

The best solu­tion I have seen pro­posed is a vari­a­tion on cir­cles, pub­lic cir­cles if you will. These would be cir­cles that peo­ple could add them­selves to and so wouldn’t require the poster to per­form all the main­te­nance. It wouldn’t solve the prob­lem of an empty pub­lic stream, but there are other ways round that.

Leave It Up To the Followers

Cur­rently the only prac­ti­cal option I have is to leave the fil­ter­ing up to my fol­low­ers. I’ve tried to make it clear on my pro­file what my pri­mary post­ing inter­ests are and cer­tainly if you read my pub­lic stream for the last day it’s pretty obvi­ous. Unless Google chooses to add pub­lic cir­cles (or some equiv­a­lent func­tion­al­ity) the only options I can give peo­ple are to use their own cir­cles as filters.

Work In Progress

Cir­cles is a major improve­ment in social net­work struc­ture, but it’s clearly not the whole solu­tion. Let’s hope for another breakthrough.

Related arti­cles

• Too Much Noise on Google Plus? Here is How I Deal With It (stay​nalive​.com)
• Google Cir­cles Explained (q​-ontech​.blogspot​.com)
• How I’m Using Google+ (glob​al​neigh​bour​hoods​.net)
• Google Plus Fea­ture Request: Auto­matic Cir­cles (read​writeweb​.com)
• Rec­i­p­ro­cal Behav­ior in Social Net­works (chris​bro​gan​.com)
• Tips for using Google+ smarter… (shan​non​turling​ton​.com)