The key to Google+ is understanding the relationship between Circles and the Stream
July 9 2011 11:00:00 AM
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In the technology world if you blink you can miss the latest product announcement or service. While most of these are flash-in-the-pans that burn out after a few minutes of bright flames, Google's new social networking site Google+ is one that (for better or for worse) is here to stay, and something I think everyone should have at least a basic understand of.
The key to Google+ is understanding the relationship between Circles and the Stream.
Circles are your personal way to organize the people you interact with. By interact I mean a) the people who's posts you want to read and comment on and b) the people you want to share the things you post with.
When you first join Google+ you are provided a few default Circles (ex: Friends and Family) which are empty. At the top of the Circles screen is a list of people (don't ask about the "magic" that creates this list) that you can drag into Circles. For example, below I am adding Steve Wylie into a Circle I've named "Work Related".
Choosing how many Circles to create is a very personal topic and one that people tend to have strong opinions on. Before I explain how I've chosen to create my Circles, let me explain what Circles do, and don't do.
Circles Help You Filter Which Posts Are Displayed In The Stream
The Steam is where you read, create and comment on posts. As seen below, there are 3 main views of the Stream:
1. The primary stream shows posts from all of the people you have in your Circles
2. Each of your Circles has its own stream, displaying the posts from the people in that Circle
3. Incoming, displays posts from the people who have you in one of their Circles but you don't yet have them in one of yours. This is similar to your "Followers" in Twitter.
Circles Are Not Groups
Circles are not a shared space that people can join and are automatically mutually connected around a specific topic. For example, if you have a Photographers Circle, the people you add are not all automatically connected together, enabling everyone to share pictures and discuss photography related topics. Instead, Circles are your personal breakdown of how you want to see and share information. When you add someone to Circle they are notified that you have added them, but do not know the name of the Circle nor who the other members are.
Circles Determine Who You Share With
Well, sort of.
To set the stage, start by thinking about email, where you decide who the recipients are. There is no guarantee that they read the message, but you can be fairly certainly it showed up in their inbox. When you post a message on Twitter, you have very little control over who is reading it. You can choose to "Protect" your Tweets, which means only the people you approve as followers have access. In this model people have to choose to follow you, you don't decide who you're sending it to.
When you post a message on Google+, you choose who you "want" to share it with.
You can choose "Public" which makes the post show up in the main stream of anyone who's added you to a Circle (even if you have not added them) and the post will also be visible on your public Google profile.
You can choose a specific Circle or Circles (ex: Family, Friends, Coworkers, or Photographers) but just because you've chosen to share with these people, there is no a guarantee they will see it. If they also have you in one of their Circles, they will see your post in their main Stream. If they do not have you in one of their Circles they can still see your post, but it will be in their Incoming Stream.
You can also choose to share with your "Extended Circles". There is some complexity here, but the basic idea is that this shares your post with people in your Circles plus the people they have in their Circles... so friends of friends. Posts shared with Extended Circles reach a broader audience than just your own Circles, but are not available to everyone the way Public posts are.
So How Do I Set Up My Circles?
Notice the title of this section, "My Circles". I have no intent on lecturing you as to how you should set up your own Circles, but I will explain the though process behind how I've configured mine.
I start of by thinking about the relationships with the people in my life. I have family, friends from school, coworkers, people I share hobbies with, etc. There are some people I have very specific relationships with, and they go in one Circle. There are others who overlap across multiple facets of my life, so they are placed in multiple Circles. For me, mirroring the "real world" relationships via my Circles makes it easy for me to process the information I'm reading in the stream.
I'd estimate I currently spend 75% of my time in the main stream. I then click through the streams of my Circles, or as I call them my sub-streams.
My Circles are:
While there is no guarantee the topics being discussed in a Circle match its name, these Circles do provide me a "mental starting point" around who I expect to be seeing posts from. So if I'm interested in "What's going on with my Boston friends", I click on that list. They may be discussing computers, or golf or ultimate... but at least I start of with a nice mental picture of which subset of the people I am going to be looking at.
Configuring Circles will be different for everyone. My recommendation is to try and find the balance between being too granular which is a pain to manage and staying so broad that completely different conversations are all jumbled together.
There is no right or wrong, and the beauty is that you can tweak and adjust to find what works for you.
The key to Google+ is understanding the relationship between Circles and the Stream.
Circles are your personal way to organize the people you interact with. By interact I mean a) the people who's posts you want to read and comment on and b) the people you want to share the things you post with.
When you first join Google+ you are provided a few default Circles (ex: Friends and Family) which are empty. At the top of the Circles screen is a list of people (don't ask about the "magic" that creates this list) that you can drag into Circles. For example, below I am adding Steve Wylie into a Circle I've named "Work Related".
Choosing how many Circles to create is a very personal topic and one that people tend to have strong opinions on. Before I explain how I've chosen to create my Circles, let me explain what Circles do, and don't do.
Circles Help You Filter Which Posts Are Displayed In The Stream
The Steam is where you read, create and comment on posts. As seen below, there are 3 main views of the Stream:
1. The primary stream shows posts from all of the people you have in your Circles
2. Each of your Circles has its own stream, displaying the posts from the people in that Circle
3. Incoming, displays posts from the people who have you in one of their Circles but you don't yet have them in one of yours. This is similar to your "Followers" in Twitter.
Circles Are Not Groups
Circles are not a shared space that people can join and are automatically mutually connected around a specific topic. For example, if you have a Photographers Circle, the people you add are not all automatically connected together, enabling everyone to share pictures and discuss photography related topics. Instead, Circles are your personal breakdown of how you want to see and share information. When you add someone to Circle they are notified that you have added them, but do not know the name of the Circle nor who the other members are.
Circles Determine Who You Share With
Well, sort of.
To set the stage, start by thinking about email, where you decide who the recipients are. There is no guarantee that they read the message, but you can be fairly certainly it showed up in their inbox. When you post a message on Twitter, you have very little control over who is reading it. You can choose to "Protect" your Tweets, which means only the people you approve as followers have access. In this model people have to choose to follow you, you don't decide who you're sending it to.
When you post a message on Google+, you choose who you "want" to share it with.
You can choose "Public" which makes the post show up in the main stream of anyone who's added you to a Circle (even if you have not added them) and the post will also be visible on your public Google profile.
You can choose a specific Circle or Circles (ex: Family, Friends, Coworkers, or Photographers) but just because you've chosen to share with these people, there is no a guarantee they will see it. If they also have you in one of their Circles, they will see your post in their main Stream. If they do not have you in one of their Circles they can still see your post, but it will be in their Incoming Stream.
You can also choose to share with your "Extended Circles". There is some complexity here, but the basic idea is that this shares your post with people in your Circles plus the people they have in their Circles... so friends of friends. Posts shared with Extended Circles reach a broader audience than just your own Circles, but are not available to everyone the way Public posts are.
So How Do I Set Up My Circles?
Notice the title of this section, "My Circles". I have no intent on lecturing you as to how you should set up your own Circles, but I will explain the though process behind how I've configured mine.
I start of by thinking about the relationships with the people in my life. I have family, friends from school, coworkers, people I share hobbies with, etc. There are some people I have very specific relationships with, and they go in one Circle. There are others who overlap across multiple facets of my life, so they are placed in multiple Circles. For me, mirroring the "real world" relationships via my Circles makes it easy for me to process the information I'm reading in the stream.
I'd estimate I currently spend 75% of my time in the main stream. I then click through the streams of my Circles, or as I call them my sub-streams.
My Circles are:
- Work Related - Currently this group overlaps about 90% with my main stream. This will change over time as Google+ opens up to the public and my friends and family start to join. I may separate this into "E2.0 World" and "IBM World" which is how I have Twitter setup, because the conversations in those two groups is often quite different.
- My Family - Here I can quickly see what my siblings and cousins are up to. Only a few of them are currently on Google+, but this is the same way I use Facebook so I wanted to mirror it here.
- Friends-Boston
- Friends-Toronto
- Sports-Golf
- Sports-Ultimate
While there is no guarantee the topics being discussed in a Circle match its name, these Circles do provide me a "mental starting point" around who I expect to be seeing posts from. So if I'm interested in "What's going on with my Boston friends", I click on that list. They may be discussing computers, or golf or ultimate... but at least I start of with a nice mental picture of which subset of the people I am going to be looking at.
Configuring Circles will be different for everyone. My recommendation is to try and find the balance between being too granular which is a pain to manage and staying so broad that completely different conversations are all jumbled together.
There is no right or wrong, and the beauty is that you can tweak and adjust to find what works for you.
Great post Alan - probably best explanation so far about the difference between circles and streams.
Just a quick question - asked the same on Twitter. When I add a "post" and then click on my friends circle it shows my own posts. No other circle does this. Is this a glitch or is it suppose to happen (and what would be the reason for it happening?)
Hi Liam. I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Are you saying you create a new post and share it with a Circle named Friends, then go to the profile page of one of the people in your Friends Circle, you see the post you just made at the top of their profile?
how come i have notifications telling me that 30 people have added me, but on my profile it only says that 2 people have added me to their circles? is that not what the notifications are essentially telling me?
Hi Sue. This is a confusing part of Google+. The answer is based on the privacy settings of people's Google+ profiles. When you are logged onto Google, you'll see a drop down at the top right with your name on it. Click there and select privacy. Scroll down and you'll see "Network Visibility". These settings control how the "In your circles" and "Have you in circles" sections appear.
This is fantastic. How do you feel about reposts? Id like to share this on G+. Id do a direct link.
@5 Jeremy, thank you for the compliment. Please feel free to post links where ever you would like.
Hi Alan, nice post you have here. But I have the same problem with Sue, It's not about how we want to show the "have you in circles" section but we are confused that the number doesn't increase, my friends and I tried to add me again and again in their circles but the number in the "have you in circles" doesn't increase. Is that a bug or we need to do something in the setting of the Google Plus that I can't find? I have 18 friends of mine immediately added me in their circles but it still shows 2 in the "have you in circles". Hope you can help me with this. Thanks. :)
Quincey, go to your Google Profile, click the Edit button. Click anywhere on the In Your Circles section on the bottom left. This will display the settings you can choose from for displaying who is in your circles and who has you in their circles. Save. Have all your friends do the same thing.
Alan, first of all, great post. I am, however, having the same issue as Quincey and Sue. It isn't a question of the settings not being applied. It's that if I even look in my Circles section it will show "People who have added you" and then 12, but then under my profile it will only show 2 people there that "Have me in circles". I've tested this with friends also, taken off the settings, reapplying them, and logging out, logging back in. I think this has got to be a bug of some kind.
Thanks,
J.
I'm having the same issue! It's embarrassing that I've added all these people to my circles but it looks like no one has added me...it only says 1 on my profile when really there are 23 people who have added me. It's angering me as more people add me but don't show up on my page. And it's NOT a privacy issue...I've relooked at all the privacy settings to make sure my circle visibility settings are how I want them.
Yes, I am having the same thing happen. I am stuck on 5 and have new people adding me but not showing up as if they have.
I'm having the same issues everyone above is having, though the first issue, same as Liam (first commenter), is what brought me to your post.
I believe what Liam was trying to say is that our *own* posts show up in not only the stream, but in each filters' stream (friends, family, acquaintances, etc). I have no clue how to filter out my own posts from a stream/sub-stream.
As for the number of people who've added you, verses what shows, I really think this is a bug.
I think they may have fixed it! I can see some new people that have me in their circles today! Working for anyone else?
For me, the numbers under "People Who's Added You" (on the Circles screen) and "Have Alan In Circles" (on my profile) are no where near each other.
@Alan Ya, those are not the same for me either... it bumped up a bit but still not right.
I'm having the same problem with 3 showing as added me in circles but i have over 20 who have now added me.
Love your blog!
I recently joined G+ and have the same problem. I got several friends who've added me to their circles, and they're in mine too, yet my profile only lists people in my circles and not circles I'm in. I believe it's because G+ thinks I'm in zero circles but that simply isn't true. And kinda embarassing. Doesn't G+ update stuff in realtime?
And yes, I've changed the privacy settings + enabled "show people who have added you to circles" and so have my friends.
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