I am finding it pretty difficult to figure out the best way to use Circles on Google+. My first thought was to use them to emulate real-life networks, but this led to some issues that I did not anticipate.

Incongruent relationships in real-life networks

My first attempt at using Circles divided my friends as follows:

• Family
• High school friends
• College friends
• People who lived in Hawaii
• People who I studied abroad with

After I spent some time implementing this division, I realized that my relationships to the people within these networks was very different, and that I did not want to share certain things with just my high school friends because they do not all have the same interests. I soon realized that without setting up your Circles in a way that is relevant to how you want to share, the feature is basically useless. While I try to figure out the most useful way to categorize my relationships into Circles, I have just been posting all of my stuff to the public Circle.

Some automation would be nice

Google+ really forces you to think about how you want to divide your Circles without giving you much guidance. I have a feeling that Circles will be a very powerful feature in the future, but it is intentionally “setup required.” It needs to be more automatic. A system where I can easily see how Google+ thinks I should divide my friends but ultimately leaves the final say up to me seems like the best design to me, and I have no doubt that Google+ will move in this direction as the product develops and the user-base grows.

Chaining invites to Circles

One ingenious aspect of the social design of Google+ is how you can only invite someone by adding them to a Circle. It forces the user to engage with the Circles feature on Google+, which is its primary defining feature.

Parting thoughts

It has been pretty obvious around the tech-sphere that Google+ is betting its success on Circles. I want to be sold on this idea, but I have yet to figure out the best way to use the feature. I will post again if I have any breakthroughs, but in the meantime, I would appreciate it if you left a comment, explaining how you have decided to categorize your relationships with Circles on Google+.