Facebook groups are cumbersome to setup and use and generally feel like a Band-Aid patch so I'm not going to talk about them here.
Other than that Facebook's sharing model is a broadcast to all your "friends" - the folks you are connected to. This bulk communication method has two serious drawbacks. Many people, like me, don't share certain content on Facebook because they don't feel like the content is relevant to the the entirety of their friends, e.g. sharing family pictures with folks you never personally met. Many people, me for example, over-share by posting stuff not relevant to many of their friends, e.g. my friends who own an iPhone could care less about my Android updates.
With Circles Google+ strikes a balance between these extremes by letting us share content with people who most likely will be interested in it. It translates to less spam and higher engagement (comments, re-shares, +1's). In Google+ it seems plausible to have 1000+ folks in your circles and still be able to meaningfully communicate with them.
In contrast to Facebook's symmetric friends model Google+ Circles are asymmetric, which is another great way of cutting down the amount of spam coming your way. More on that later.
5 comments:
There multiple circles apps on FB. My friends (social media startup company) even wrote one of them back in 2007.
There multiple circles apps on FB. My friends (social media startup company) even wrote one of them back in 2007.
@Al, there are multiple circles on FB, but, like groups, they, too, are "clunky." It's not possible to share to subgroups with many mobile apps, and you have to click through several layers if you want to just read updates from one "circle." These two FB features combined make selective sharing or reading a chore.
There are many great applications out there (hey, ActionComplete is great :-)) However relatively few apps gain real traction and reach millions of users. If a feature is built-in, it's exposed to the whole userbase.
Borys, I couldn't agree more. Check out this post on how the use of g+ circles helps us crowdsource curation and filter noise (if you've not seen it already, that is.)
http://blog.ericreasons.com/2011/07/google-managing-community-and-audience.html
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