Running in Circles

Over the weekend I finally took some time to check out Google+, I haven’t played with all the features yet, and I am yet to be convinced that it will replace Facebook and Twitter where most of my sharing takes place today, but I am keeping an open mind, and it certainly has some nice features. If you have an Android phone be sure to check out the Google+ App for Android.

I am not going to write a full review of Google+ there are enough of them out there already, but I am going to talk about the Circles feature.

The thing is, I hate maintaining lists, which is one of the reasons why my music player of choice is my second generation iPod shuffle.  There are many things I like about the shuffle, but mostly it’s the fact that I don’t have to maintain playlists, I just load it up and go, it does the rest of the work for me.  Facebook has Friend Lists which are similar to circles, but except for a couple of lists I use to make sure I don’t miss certain updates I have never taken the time to create and manage lists.  Back to circles, nice idea, but am I really going to spend the time creating and managing them? Probably not.

Beyond simply creating and managing lists, or circles (I do manage a couple of Twitter lists but they are low maintenance) there is another question.  Do I really feel secure using a list or circle to decide who can see what post on my social networks? First I am putting a lot of confidence in Google or Facebook’s privacy and security controls to post something and expect that only a certain few will see it.  Second there is the inevitable screw up that will happen when I post something to the wrong circle, and if you are saying “that won’t happen to me” be honest who hasn’t sent a direct message as a tweet by accident?

So how about you? Will you use Google+? If yes will you manage your circles and share differently with different circles or will you be like me, one circle fits all?