Now that I finally know what it’s for, I cleaned up my Google+ Circles
I rearranged my Circles to actually make sense. (My original circles were very much the product of still trying to wrap my head around the difference between G+ “Circles” and Facebook “Lists”.)
Here’s the difference, at least as far as I am concerned, if anyone’s wondering:
If you, like me, don’t micro-manage where each of your posts are going, you’re probably not using G+ Circles in the same way as Facebook lists. 99% of my posts on G+ are Public, and the remaining 1% are so internal (and potentially incendiary!) that the rest of the world wouldn’t be interested.
This is the same with Facebook. In fact, on Facebook, 100% of my posts are Public, because a) Facebook finally allowed us to make Public posts, and b) if I had something to hide, I definitely wouldn’t hide it on Facebook.
That means I never “target” my posts in any specific directions. My Lists or Circles are for my own benefit.
On Facebook, my Lists are comprised of different categories of friends. I have friends from the U.S. when I was an exchange student; I have friends from Roskilde University; I have friends from way before the land of time, and I have friends that I’ve never actually met yet.
Since Facebook, at least in my view, is based around the concept of catching up with people you already know, I’ve organized my Lists based on where I know them from.
On Google+, the point is to get out there and meet new people. So my Circles are — at least, now they are — categorized according to my own interests, and where people I add to Circles fall into those categories.
Of course, a few acquaintances fall through the cracks with this approach, because, uh, just what in the hell were my common interests with my high school drinking buddy, other than, well, drinking? But for the most part — and more importantly, in the future to come — this system’s going to work.
See, originally, I was doing the Facebook-thing where I was lumping people into either incredibly wide or incredibly narrow categories, like “Foreign friends” (which contained every single person I knew who didn’t speak Danish), or the very ill-defined “Pages” (which was rapidly getting out of hand).
But now, we’ve got this cool feature where you can share Circles with other people. And so it finally dawned on me that, even though I’ll probably never use that feature, either, the time for playing “who’s my BFF this month?” with my friend-lists was over. We’re meeting on an entirely new plane here on G+ — one I sincerely hope other people will soon realize is not only vastly different from what we all know and possibly loathe from Facebook; it’s also incredibly fun.
Yes, now there’s a pegging order, and I’m pegging you, baby!
