As a follow on to my thoughts on creating and managing circles earlier in the week, as I continue to play with Google+ I find that the greater issue is not the time and effort to manage the lists, but rather the false sense of security they provide.
This morning for the first time I decided to Share someone elses post on Google+, the original post looked like this
This post originated with a person not in my stream, when I view their Profile I see other posts but not the one that was Shared by a person who is in my circle, which was shared with a Limited group of people. I didn’t notice the Limited on the screen until I went to Share the post when I was prompted with this:
This is very similar to when I wrote about protected Twitter accounts, sure you can protect your account, but any follower you approve can subsequently retweet or share your tweets with others.
I think Circles are going to lull people in to a false sense of security that when they share with a Circle it will stay within that circle only. A simple pop up warning isn’t going to do it. I am all for sharing just make sure you understand who you are sharing what information with, and what potential path that information may travel.
You can disable resharing on your posts by clicking the drop-down action list (downward triangle) on your post. Though, I do agree that it should work the other way. You should be able to set a “Disable reshare by default” option, at which point, you would use the action list to enable resharing.
I think it’s great to see FaceBook get some competition in this space. Circles is a cool feature but arguably it’s too complicated for most FaceBook users who don’t use lists and are focused on whether or not someone is a friend. Google+ is fully of features that will appeal to geeks which is a good thing for us geeks :-). One of the key values I see of Google+ is that it will promote the usage of other Google services (Gmail, Picasa, Docs etc.)