Thanks to fashionista Ms. Miko Omegamu*, I got an invite to Google+, and I'm enjoying the Google Circles feature quite a bit. As I mentioned yesterday, the user interface is exceptionally cool -- you click and drag your Google contacts into an appropriate social circle, and each time you add a name, it makes a satisfying, glowing "click". You can also customize your own circles, so of course, I set up a "Second Life circle" and began corralling my many avatar contacts there. But that immediately exposed a shortcoming to the circle metaphor; take a look:
My circle includes a lot of avatar contacts, people I know only in Second Life. But then it also includes someone like John Lester, formerly known as an avatar named Pathfinder Linden, when he was with Linden Lab, but now currently known for his work with another virtual world. On top of that, John's a real life bud who I have a Guinness or two (or three) with every now and again. So does he really belong in the Second Life circle? Or do I have to create another circle: Friends I Originally Knew Through Second Life Who Are Still Engaged in Second Life But Mostly Doing Other Things Including Beers With Me? I imagine many people will have this classification problem: Co-workers who are also close friends, for example. One solution, it seems to me, is to make Google Circles more like Venn Diagrams, which allow you the ability to overlap your affiliations as needed. That would make these Circles seem more relevant to how people actually live their life, or for that matter, their Second Life.
*Additional thanks to Nalates Urriah, Fleep Tuque, Tateru Nino, Naoyoshi Shimaya, Mark Lentczer, who also offered to hook me up.
So, you can't put contacts into more than one circle?
Posted by: Wrath | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:04 PM
So... you're saying you can't easily pigeonhole your friends? There goes the nice neat circles... I suppose this is like arranging inventory in SL.
It will be interesting to see what Google does with this. I've already seen concern voiced by those that have huge numbers of contacts.
Posted by: Nalates Urriah | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:12 PM
Venn diagrams are fun, but they get very n-dimensional very quickly with more than a few variables.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:17 PM
You've inspired me to create a new "People I have been drunk with" circle.
Posted by: Pathfinder | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:26 PM
What Arcadia said. Might as well call circles what they are, sets, and let them be defined in terms of the set operations we all know and love (union, intersection, and complement) as well as by simple enumeration.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 01:05 PM
Er, except that you _can_ put contacts into multiple circles. I've been doing that for cases pretty much exactly like your example right from the start.
Posted by: Athanasius Skytower | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 01:20 PM
It'll be interesting to see if a large influx of SL residents early on might influence how the service handles avatar accounts, etc.
Posted by: Vax Sirnah | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 02:41 PM
One way to get a Google+ invitation is to make a high-enough bid on an eBay auction. There are several up for grabs as I write this. An auction that expires in 27 minutes currently has a high bid of $20.61.
Posted by: Troy McConaghy | Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 08:20 PM
This is funny. I had the same idea about the venn thing and googled it and this came up.
yeah...+ needs venn
Posted by: mike lawson | Sunday, July 03, 2011 at 10:52 PM