Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends?
When Google+ launched last week, one of the most discussed features was Circles. In case you haven't read a single blog, Tweet, or Google+ post in the last week (and yet, somehow stumbled into this dark corner of the internet), Circles is Google's way of allowing you to group people.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+ was introduced in June as a rethink of real-life sharing, after earlier reports of a Google social network built around Circles. Its grouping model arrives alongside Katango's automated Facebook-friend grouping, making contact organization a contested product capability rather than a background address-book function.
First-order effects
- Google+ users gain a way to separate audiences for sharing, while Google makes the quality of those group-creation tools part of the service's appeal against Facebook.
- Katango faces a prominent competing approach: Google+ builds manual friend grouping into the social network, rather than offering it as a separate layer over Facebook.
Second-order effects
- Social products seeking to make audience controls usable will have to choose between asking people to maintain groups themselves and automating those classifications, with different trade-offs in effort and control.
Third-order effects
- If users adopt audience-based sharing, social networks' core interaction model shifts away from a single undifferentiated friend list toward software-mediated management of overlapping real-world relationships.
The trend: Social services are turning the friend graph into an audience-management layer, competing on how much of that organization users must do themselves.