Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [25]
You, Bob, and Rachel are all Google+ members. You and your friend Bob share a love of restaurants and fancy food pictures. Rachel is a work acquaintance you don’t know quite as well, but you know she loves books about management, leadership, and motivation, with titles like “Getting There Innoventually.”
You add Bob to your Foodies circle, since you two share that interest. You add Rachel to your Forced Acquaintance circle (remember, no one but you sees the names you give to your circles).
After organizing your circles, you decide to post a cute picture of your cat, Butterscotch, curled up next to some liquor that’s still sitting out from last night’s little gathering. Now you have to choose who to share it with. You know it’s not a good idea to share photos that include booze with all your circles (since your parents might see it) or everyone on the Internet (since your boss might see it), so you want to choose a specific subset of your Google+ friends. Bob was at the shindig and will probably like the picture, but Rachel tends to spend her evenings crunching at the gym, cleaning out her work inbox, and planning her action items for the next day, so she probably won’t be amused by Butterscotch’s antics. So you share the photo with your Foodies circle.
Does Bob see it? Yes—if he’s added you to one of his circles and he looks at his main stream, since that stream includes all the posts from everyone in all of his circles. However, if Bob has created a circle that you’re not in called Feline-Free Friends, when he browses through that circle’s stream (which he does by clicking Feline-Free Friends on the left side of his Stream page), he won’t see Butterscotch there. But if he looks at the stream for the Gourmands circle he added you to, then he’ll see the snapshot. (This is a good example of how you can use your various streams to filter whose posts you see.)
TIP
So, what if you add Bob to a circle, but he hasn’t added you to any of his? Then Bob won’t see most of your posts. The only cases where he will see them are if a mutual friend of yours and Bob’s shares your post (Sharing Others’ Posts), if you mention Bob in the post (Mentioning People in Posts), or you specifically add him to the list of people and circles you’re sharing the post with. But otherwise, Bob’s streams will be mostly free of your posts, though he’ll continue to show up in your streams.
Rachel, on the other hand, doesn’t see the picture of Butterscotch and the bottle of crème de cacao because you intentionally didn’t send it her way. She won’t see your adorable orange furball even if she’s added you her “Professional Contacts to Synergize and Conquer” circle or she goes out of her way to click your profile to see what you’ve posted recently.
So remember, there are two sides to the whole circles thing: the circles you arrange your friends into, and the circles your friends create and put you in. You control your own circles, but there’s no way of knowing what kinds of circles other people have put you into. So all you need to worry about is deciding which circle(s) to share with, as explained in the next section.
Post Visibility Options
Now that you have a general overview of the ways you can share with certain groups of people, it’s time to learn how to actually pick those groups in Google+. These visibility options let you share items with only the people who will truly appreciate them.
As the following sections explain, Google+ tries to be smart by automatically choosing a group to share your post with based on which stream you’re viewing while you write it, but you can always choose a different group if you want.
Writing a post while viewing your main stream
On your