Social Networks Need More Circles

If Google+ got one thing right, it was the concept of circles.

LinkedIn also does this reasonably well, with the concept of connections, 2nd order connections and 3rd order connections.

But this concept should be in every social media app—and even better, there should be a social media/networking app with circles at its core.

Circles Are How We Do It Offline

Real-life social graphs are organized into circles by nature. Some are concentric circles—like your close family, your kinda-close family (grandparents, first cousins), your extended family, and so on. But some are overlapping circles—like your work colleagues, your friends from home, your friends from university, and so on.

We naturally are careful with what we share with different circles of people in our lives, and how we navigate those groups. Most people wouldn't want the boys' group chat getting sent to the moms' group chat.

Instagram sorta got this with the "Close Friends" feature, but it only allows two circles (close friends and all friends). It feels tacked-on and lame.

Group chats are the other way that this is done. But that's messaging, so everything gets buried, and there's no overlap between groups. I want to post to different circles.

Circles Build Connections

If you go onto a social network, and you start looking around for people to potentially connect with, everyone is in one of three categories:

• Someone you're already connected with;
• Someone who is connected to someone you're connected with (a "mutual");
• Everyone else, who are presented on the network as total strangers.

With this, we lose nuance on people in many of the same circles who don't have a mutual friend but would almost certainly be more inclined to connect than total randos.

Example: say you live in a city and you go to tech-related events. You meet and befriend a person there named Raj. Raj has a couple of other friends who go to tech-related events, and they have some others who they've met at these events, and so on... But you only connect with Raj, and maybe, with time, his mutuals, and maybe, eventually, their mutuals...

Wouldn't it be 10x better to just be invited into Raj's "tech friends" circle, and see (visually) the overlap with the other related circles from people who all go to the same events?

If I had this when I was working from Lisbon, maybe I'd have met more interesting people through friends-of-friends-of-friends with similar interests.

Posting to Circles is Way Better

I often find myself getting stuck when I consider posting something on, say, my Instagram story. The stuck-ness comes from considering who will see the post and what their reaction might be.

First I imagine, say, a close friend. And I think, that dude would laugh his ass off if he saw this.

Then I imagine an acquaintance from high school. Not really her thing, she'd cringe.

Then I imagine my mother. Then my older aunts. Then my friend's moms who for some reason follow me on Instagram.

And I often just decide not to post anything, because the stuff for the moms would be lame to the boyz, and the stuff for the boyz would be... inappropriate for viewing by the moms.

If Instagram had circles baked in, I would post 10x more frequently, but in a more limited way. One post to twenty or thirty of the homies. One post to everyone once in a while. One post to the family on Mother's Day. You get the idea.

Privacy & Permissions

A social media network built on Circles would have to deal with the privacy/permissions problem. In the current social media dynamic, you know that group chats and direct messages are private, while "posting" is potentially public (you can have a private profile on many apps, but generally users understand that posting something to this part of the app should be done when they want to broadcast their content out to a larger, non-specific group of people).

I recommend avoiding this problem altogether by making the proposed Circles app not a messaging/group chat app—leave that to the Whatsapps of the world—and take the Instagram Close Friends approach where users come to understand that what you post to a circle isn't going to be public but it'll be quasi-public in the sense that the people in your circle will see it, anyone you invite later to the circle might also see it, and so on.

Users are ready for that.

Please, Somebody Build Circles

I would love to see this, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has been attempted more times since Google+, but I don't do my homework on these sorts of things.

In any case, that's my rant on Circles in social media.