Facebook Engineer Builds Google+ Inspired Facebook Hack

Proof that online protests and ALL CAPS ANGRY EMAILS are useless and that competition is the only way for companies to take things that you care about seriously.<p>If you want to make change, build something.

The problem with this is that the user will be presented a giant list of several hundred friends, which is intimidating to say the least. (Facebook hasn't really tried to discourage indiscriminate friending, preferring instead to algorithmically filter what it shows you in your feed, with the result that most users have ended up with an out-of-control friend list.)<p>There's one and only one way to make this work with an already existing social graph: show the user a clustered view of their friends. To see examples, do an image search for 'vizster'. <a href="http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/vizster" rel="nofollow">http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/vizster</a>

Seriously, does he think that a hack for creating Facebook Lists is even comparable to Circles?<p>Of course this is some kind of improvement already for Facebook's standards.<p>Zuckerberg: “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists.” <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/facebook-friend-lists/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/facebook-friend-lists/</a><p>Of course, they're a HUGE pain. I mean really, I use them.<p>I thought the whole meaning of "hacking" was to let more people do more things easier. Instead, we need the world to be a more "open place" (in a huge walled garden), that sounds like someone sticking too much with his PR.<p>Facebook has already started looking messy (every time a new service comes out it has to be built in the "Social" Network apparently) and will continue to do so now that Google has started giving a serious approach.<p>I'd be glad to see Facebook "pivot" over Circles so I might KEEP using it instead of a address book.

I'm loving circles. 3 weeks ago I culled my friend list on FB down to 3 people (fellow page admins) and stopped using it for anything other than marketing at people.<p>I left for 2 reasons. First I couldn't manage the lists without a lot of pain. They have implemented lists and selective posting grudgingly, and obfuscated it out of the reach of most users.<p>Secondly, after 3 years of my handing them huge swathes of personal data they still fail to effectively advertise anything to me that I'm remotely interested in. I get that the price of a 'free' service is my personal data, I'm fine with that, I'd just like it to be used in a manner that's actually relevant to me.<p>As g+ stands, still in inimitable Google beta mode, has hit the nail almost entirely on the head for what I want a social network to do, and I can rest assured that when the advertising finally turns up it might be for something I'm interested in.<p>So here's to this staying only as a hack, FB not catching up, and to talking everyone I know onto g+ :)

And a clickable link to the hack itself, Circle Hack: <a href="http://www.circlehack.com/login.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.circlehack.com/login.html</a>

To me this feels like the first time Facebook is trying to catch up to Google instead of vice-versa (with regards to Social, of course).

I saw this yesterday when a friend of mine who is currently interning there posted it (suprise) on his facebook.<p>I started to post it here but I thought he had made it and the ui isn't great so I didn't bother<p>Leave it to Alexia to write an article about it the next day...

Why was the direct link posted a few days ago ignored while we choose to promote the Techcrunch article which adds another layer? Personally I would rather try things first-hand than hear about it from TC.<p>What does everyone else think?

Would have been better if it showed which groups user are already on, I want to be able to identify users which have no group associated and then use this tool to add, its a nice hack, but needs work to be useful.

It may look the same, but it doesn't work the same at all. The way circles work is asynchronous, not synchronous like Facebook. There are also several other reasons in the article why it doesn't work the same.

That said it is incredible frustrating talking about G+ without an invite. <i>sigh</i> According to reddit the only thing worse is being on G+ but without friends and incredible bored to death.

Back in my day, copying a competitor's feature was denounced as ripping off. Just because it's institutionalized as a "hack" is no reason for assigning it much more importance.

I kinda detailed it in another post here, but I was already using Facebook friend lists for this sort of privacy control on Facebook. PLUS the new Groups feature works like Circles. I have a Group of my close friends that is closed and private. All the photos we upload there are only visible to those in the group.<p>The problem is, Facebook has continued to move the Friends lists feature in more and more obscure places. It used to be easy to see the list and the posts from people in that list, but now they've hidden in the account menu.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook clones every single Google+ feature before Google+ is out of invite-only status. I'm guessing next will be a basic rich text status editor, to go along with the already announced video conferencing.