Comparing Google+ Circles with Facebook Lists

It’s hard to talk intelligently about Google+ Circles without working with it and seeing whether it eliminates or increases confusion. There’s no question it introduces a perceived level of complexity that your average Facebook and Twitter user don’t want to deal with.

For starters it assumes you want to follow people who don’t necessarily want to follow you. This is similar to Twitter, and different somewhat from Facebook. Facebook requires you to establish a “friend” relationship with people you want to share stuff with. You can’t just “follow” people and receive notification of their posts. You have to become friends – that is, you need permission to “follow”.

That’s definitely different from Google+. If you add someone to a Google+ Circle you can see their posts – at least the ones they mark as public. That is very Twitter-like. Facebook will not allow you to “follow” Mark Zukerberg or Dave Letterman, unless they agree to be friends with you.

Facebook Business Pages

Facebook business pages are another matter. FB reduces the impact of this required “permission” by allowing people to “like” a business page and thereby receive notifications from those pages as new posts are made. It’s not quite the same since it is Facebook rather than you who makes the decision what you’re going to see. Once again we see Facebook assuming, for whatever reason, that it is better for them to make the decision about “what to see” rather than leaving it up to you.

Following someone and putting them in a Circle is pretty seamless.

Lists in Facebook

Also, in Facebook, once you are friends then the impact of the Circle thing is (at least in theory) less important – because Facebook will let you create “Lists” where you can put individual friends, school buddies, work colleagues, family, etc. and specify what sort of stuff you want to see from them, and how much of your stuff you want them to see. Apart from the in-your-face organizational features of Google+ Circles, the purported advantage is that you can differentiate at the level of sharing. Not everybody gets to see everything, etc. Lists (if you choose to use them) lets you do pretty much the same thing in Facebook.

As many critics of Google+ have pointed out, Facebook has the “Lists” capability but it has been downplayed by FB because it is generally not used much by Facebook members. Some argue this proves “they don’t want it.” (For example, see this old article:
Google Circles: The Dumbest Thing About Google+

Now that Google+ has been around for more than 2 years we should be able to get a pretty good fix on how the Circles thing has worked out. But I haven’t done the research, so have no idea whether Circles is viewed as useful by most users. I do have the feeling that immediately putting people into categories is not as onerous as the critics make it seem. It is much like fiing images in Pinterest in a particular “board”. You just do it, and after the fact you’re glad you did. Facebook makes Lists less obvious so the advantages of using it are generally ignored.

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