Google, Eric Berne circled friends first

I find this rather ridiculous. Most people I know have multiple groups of friends, little cross-over between them, and are happy to share different things about themselves with different groups.<p>Being able to tell my golfing stories with my golfing buddies, without worrying about boring my old uni friends, is a positive thing, and makes it more likely that I'll update in the first place.

<i>Games:<p>You and the girl have a relationship similar to the one between Maddie Hayes and David Addison from Moonlighting. Only much much less interesting.</i><p>How the hell am I supposed to know what this means?

Thanks everyone for the great comments. I kinda wish that you wrote these comments to the discussions under the blog so that every reader can benefit from it. As it is, the comments are scattered throughout the social networking universe. :-)<p>I am not surprised that some of you find this argument ridiculous. It is meant to be that way. Most of us here at Hacker News are software developers. We all have a tendency to overengineer unimportant details in life. :-). An engineer commented that even the Circles were not good enough for him. And he was right. He was pushing circles up to its limits and unless Google implemented Cylinders there was no way of pleasing him.<p>However, all this opposition proves my point: Grouping friends and posting accordingly is a rather advanced feature that does not solve a problem for the ordinary user, because the problem does not exist in the first place.<p>Most people don't even realize that what they post might only be relevant to some of their friends, because most people are vain. And if their friends post an item in Facebook that they don't care, they simply ignore it blissfully and go about their day.<p>This is just fine for most people. :-)

I think our grouping of friends is generally suppressed in our thinking. We have fine-grained distinctions among our friends, but we generally don't see it that way because they're not important re <i>friendship</i>.<p>Instead, we have different conversations with different friends. While this is normally private, that's only because of how we're interacting--in person, over chat, etc.--and not because of any desire to keep it secret. A social media site has analogs to a more general meet-up or party in that our conversations are often <i>on the side</i>: we're not talking to everyone but we don't mind people listening in.<p>The article's critique wouldn't have much intuitive appeal if it was possible to create "open" circles where conversations wouldn't appear in public, but a user who wished to see them could listen in and possibly comment, signaling their interest in joining that group.

This structure is old, and needs to be revised, since it was invented before the internet. Now, where do I put Linus torvalds on that list ? or even Larry Page, since they've got a G+ account and I have added them to the circle "modern age shakers".