"Each of us on average has hundreds of friends on Facebook. When you share things on Facebook, you have to share it with all of them! How stupid is that?"
It would be stupid ... if it were actually true. Facebook's privacy controls are actually pretty sophisticated now: by default I have anything I post shown to friends of friends, but excluding certain people. For potentially controversial status updates I restrict visibility to a couple of lists. If I wanted I could target a photo or status to an individual person.
So, Facebook already has all of this control baked into its architecture. In theory, all it needs to do is make it more easily discoverable and easily used. Of course this is easier said than done, but it's certainly not a 'major architectural overhaul'.
I do wish that, when people slate a platform for not having certain features, they would actually do a little research instead of assuming.
"I do wish that, when people slate a platform for not having certain features, they would actually do a little research instead of assuming."
I agree with the sentiment and the subtley here that I've come to appreciate over the years which is this; A feature which is hard to discover or understand is the same as 'not existing' for a large portion of the customers.
There is also the "Facebook's privacy controls are actually pretty sophisticated now ..." which dismisses the painful walk it took to get there. That pain doesn't go away quickly or easily.
Having used G+ for a while I tend to agree with the article that FB will have to step up their game here. The beast is awake and its opening move was much more credible than previous attempts. What is more I think it has moved the expectation of what your social network should do for you forward.
I'm sure FB will respond, and there are a lot of smart folks who will no doubt have their own killer ideas. If nothing else, having a credible competitor will make social networking better for everyone.
I actually like Facebook's privacy better. Except for chat's online/offline status, it seems to follow a 'most restrictive permission applies" policy, which is nice.
Using Google's example: If I have a biking group and a work group, there's probably someone in the intersection of those two groups. I might want to share something with my biking group but not share it with my work group. There's not a mechanism to do that, that I can find, in Google+.
On the other hand, in Facebook, if I post something but restrict it from my work group, people that are in my work group won't see the post even if they're also in another group that does have permission.
This is a vastly superior approach, it seems to me.
There may not be in G+ yet. I know you can share with just 1 person if you want. What they need to do is implement the reverse of +Name, so if I add a group I could then do -Name and it would be the whole group minus that person. Or even +CircleA -CircleB would only get me those in A not in B.
I don't get it, if they are in your biking group, why would you want to not share something with them just because they happen to be in the work group too?
Maybe the bike circle as a whole exists as a place to ask questions ("My chainset is hosed! Anyone have recommendations for a new one?") but he only actually goes out biking with people he doesn't work with. More to the point, why does it matter why he doesn't want to share something with them in this particular example when it's really easy to construct good examples?
I have a set of close friends that I share just about everything with. It's a somewhat large size. Some of them I am in fantasy sports leagues with, some of them are techie types, some of them are fans of the same sports teams I am. I don't necessarily want to flood the stream of people that I know aren't interested.
There's many cases where individual circles of friends have a intersections or just don't fully mesh. It'll be interesting to see how this proceeds. UI/UX is going to dictate how successful circles are.
> I do wish that, when people slate a platform for not having certain features, they would actually do a little research instead of assuming.
I do agree with this, obviously, whole-heartedly. But, at the same time, I feel like the lack of research in this case is kind of making a point of its own. The circles feature has garnered a lot of praise from people while it seems that very few people even know about Facebook lists and even fewer even use them (if the articles and discussion on HN are any indication). A feature nobody knows about is as good as missing and I'm sure their designers are going to have some fun if FB decides they need to emphasise their lists more.
4 clicks vs 1 click. That's the difference between sharing with a list and sharing with a circle. You know what takes less clicks? Changing my monitor's resolution. Assigning my iMac a static IP instead of using DHCP. Changing my sound output to go over HDMI instead of using local speakers. Those are semi complicated things that your average user doesn't do. It shouldn't be that hard.
It would be stupid ... if it were actually true. Facebook's privacy controls are actually pretty sophisticated now: by default I have anything I post shown to friends of friends, but excluding certain people. For potentially controversial status updates I restrict visibility to a couple of lists. If I wanted I could target a photo or status to an individual person.
So, Facebook already has all of this control baked into its architecture. In theory, all it needs to do is make it more easily discoverable and easily used. Of course this is easier said than done, but it's certainly not a 'major architectural overhaul'.
I do wish that, when people slate a platform for not having certain features, they would actually do a little research instead of assuming.