Quote:
Originally Posted by
GQgeek 
And Circles? Duh. How facebook didn't think of something like that i'll never understand. Having everyone post/see the same wall is idiotic. (again, if that's changed at all, my bad, but based on wired article it doesn't seem like it has)
This is why despite all of google's other huge failures at socializing their services...I think this might work.
The facebook news feed grew organically--before it existed, everybody just had walls on their profiles that only someone looking at your profile would see. Then they added the news feed and a lot of people freaked out until they realized that at the time facebook was still pretty much all college students so all of your friends were still in about the same "circle"
Now that my grandma (no joke) is on facebook, it would be handy if I could control what goes to her. Ditto with posts aimed at my cycling team where people geek out over obscure bike parts while my friends have their eyes glaze over (one of my teammates has two twitters...one for friends and one for biking). You can add people to limited profile which worked at the beginning if you were just like "no, I don't want my mom to see my drunken photos with these skanky chicks" but now I've got my dad tagging me in family photos. A lot of people's solutions to this is to just disable photos so that you can only see their profile photos--they still show up tagged in photos, but you can't click on them to browse other photos.
If google can make this work, it is because circles are the killer app that people need (provided facebook can't provide it in a better interface quickly). It doesn't even have to kill facebook...I can still use facebook for the general stuff (like "oh hi, I met you at a party, be my friend") but can use google circles to stick with the cycling world (which already involves several google groups, results posted to google docs, event photos to picasa) and another circle to hang out with my close friends (who already all use gmail and gchat to communicate).