Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [12]
Circles let you easily share info with folks who actually care about it, and let you restrict sensitive tidbits to just a trusted few. For example, when you’re dying to tell the world about the amazing new coffee blend you discovered at your local roaster, you can write a post about it and then share that post only with your Foodies and Friends circles, knowing that coworkers in the Better Future Corp. circle look down on such frivolity. Likewise, you can be sure when you’re looking through posts by people in your Friends circle that you won’t see any research summaries on cybernetic limb enhancement, and that many a cute nephew pic awaits you in your Family circle. You can let your Best Friends circle see all the photos from your Silly Pantsapalooza ’11 weekend, while giving your Book Club circle a peek at just one (notably cropped) shot of you sitting by the campfire.
You don’t have to create circles to use Google+. You could post updates and photos using the Public setting (explained on Writing a post while viewing your main stream), making them visible to anyone who’s added you to their own Google+ circles and anyone on the Web who has sought you out. Or you could selectively share certain things with certain people, typing out their names and cherry-picking them for each update (Other posting tips explains how to do this). But circles help make sense of who can see your profile, posts, and photos. In effect, circles create multiple versions of your Google+ account—the Friends version, the Grandchildren version, the Design School version, and so on—that you customize for each group with your custom-grouped circles And maybe the best part of circles is that nobody sees them except you—so feel free to create a Never Really Liked circle for folks you only grudgingly interact with. This chapter explains everything you need to know about creating and managing circles.
How Circles Work
WHEN YOU FIRST JOIN Google+, the site provides you with four circles that you can use if you want. (If you don’t like Google+’s circle suggestions, you can ignore, delete, or rename them.) To see these suggestions, head to your Circles page by clicking the Circles icon at the top of any Google+ page.
Google’s suggested circles give you an idea of how you might organize the people you’re connecting to on Google+. You can point to each circle to see a description of it. Here’s how you might want to use each one:
Friends. This circle is a good start, but you’ll likely want to create separate circles for close friends who know all your deep dark secrets and for friends you know from very specific contexts.
Family. Again, this circle may be a bit too all-encompassing, since not all family members fit into one big container, let alone at one Thanksgiving table. For example, you may want separate circles for your siblings and for your in-laws.
Acquaintances. You may not find this circle very useful. Why? Because, acquaintances aren’t as close as friends, so if you post something that you want to share with everyone, you may as well just make it visible to everyone on the Web.
Following. Google+ suggests using this circle in a way similar to the Follow feature on Twitter. You can add people to this circle so you can see their posts, even if you’ve never met those folks personally. (Think celebrities and politicians.) But in contrast to Twitter, where you can see every tweet posted by the people you’re following, on Google+ you only see these people’s public posts (unless they’ve added you to one of their circles and are sharing with that circle).
NOTE
There is a way for people in your Following circle to see what you post (Other posting tips has the details). But it’s unlikely that popular figures you add to this circle will see your posts, or even that you’ve added them to a circle, so it’s pretty