Google+ Circles Feature

Discussions center on Google+'s Circles feature for categorizing contacts into groups like family or coworkers and selectively sharing posts, often praising it over Facebook's equivalents while noting low adoption.

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Sample Comments

darwinGod Aug 29, 2011 View on HN

From some browsing on Google + , I feel that many aren't using circles the right way. I am able to see random people's post planning for trek during the weekend. If it were FB, I might not have seen it. Maybe I would have been prompted to 'add as friend' .

imauld Jun 28, 2016 View on HN

The circles feature was amazing on Google Plus. It does exactly what you want. You add "friends" to your Google Plus profile and add them to circles you create, "Work Friends", "Pub Friends", "Family" for example. Then once you share a post you decide what circles get to see it.It was a great feature too bad no one cared about Google Plus.

mustardo Mar 15, 2021 View on HN

The one thing Google plus got right with "circles" IMHO

jokoon Sep 10, 2017 View on HN

Didn't google+ do just that with circles?

thomastjeffery Mar 29, 2017 View on HN

Facebook lets you tailor messages to a subset of your friends, but Facebook's method difficult and unintuitive. Google+ did a great job at this with circles, unfortunately none of the people I know actually started using it.

CountSessine Mar 8, 2022 View on HN

This was one of the ideas behind Google+ - "circles". You could put other people in different broadcast "circles" and then you wouldn't end up announcing your weird fetish preferences or drug use to your grandma or your coworkers - at least not intentionally.

ImprovedSilence Jul 12, 2011 View on HN

He should just stick to a reddit subgroup or facebook or twitter or something. I kinda like the privacy and simplicity of circles. And in this realm there is no one size fits all. Google+ can be more small, closed group oriented, someone else can fill your broadcasting desires. Emphasis on everything is emphasis on nothing, and google circles fills a void between email and broadcast (twittter/FB feed) that I love. Keep it that way.

digamber_kamat Jul 6, 2011 View on HN

Facebook lists seem to be equivalent of Circles. Why should I be using Google+ except that it is from Google ?

spiredigital Dec 28, 2011 View on HN

Google+'s killer feature (at least from what I've seen) is Circles. Not being able to easily control who sees what on Facebook is the reason I don't post more personal content to it. Being able to easily control what I share and with who - like I do in the real world - would make me 10x more likely to become an active participant on a social network. It might be time to actually sign up for an account....

throwawaysml Nov 5, 2017 View on HN

Didn't Google try to solve that with circles. I never used Facebook or any other "social network", so I'm probably unaware of some details, but I read about circles when Google+ came out and it sounded like a solution for exactly this problem.