Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [26]
To be more selective about who you share with, click the “+Add circles or people to share with” box. A menu appears that includes several options. The text at the top of the menu explains that you can type a person’s name or email address to share just with that person, or type the name of the circle you want to share with. Here’s what the other options are for:
Specific circles. At the top of the menu are the names of your circles. If you have more than three or four circles, you’ll also see a “# more” link that indicate how many other circles you have that aren’t shown in the list; click this link to see the names of all your circles. To select the circle you want to share with, click its name in this list or type its name in the +Add box.
TIP
The first three circles you see listed in this menu are the ones in the upper left of the circles section of your Circles page (covered in Chapter 2). Changing the order they appear in this list is a simple matter of heading to your Circles page and then dragging your most important circles to the first three slots.
Your circles. This means that your post will be shared with everyone in all your circles. If you share that picture of Butterscotch with this group, both Bob and Rachel will likely see it in their main Google+ streams, which include everything posted by everybody in their circles. In addition, Bob will see it in his Gourmands stream, and Rachel will see it in her “Professional Contacts to Synergize and Conquer” stream.
Extended circles. This option is something of an odd duck. It includes all the people in all your circles and all the people in their circles. It’s the Google+ equivalent of “friends of friends,” except that your posts appear in the Incoming streams of the people in your friends’ circles. (The box on The Incoming Stream has more about this stream.)
Public. If you cropped that photo of Butterscotch so that it showed nothing but your fuzzy feline, then you’d have no reason not to post it for the whole world to see. In that case, you could post it using the Public setting. Doing that sends the post to all your Google+ contacts and makes it visible to everyone on Google+ and on the whole Internet. That means that a friend of yours could copy and paste the timestamp from your post (see Editing, Deleting, and Controlling Your Posts for details), send it out in an email, post it to their blog, or otherwise distribute it, and anybody could look at it.
Posting something publicly isn’t as scary as it may sound. It’s a great option for people working in the media, building their personal or small business brand, or trying to get attention for their chosen topics. Public sharing is what people do on Twitter, and it’s increasingly how Facebook wants its users to share their posts and photos. In Google+, it just means that you’re sharing to everyone in your circles and other people could potentially find it on the Web.
When you select an option in this list, a corresponding blue or green rectangle appears in the +Add box. For example, if you have a Lifehacker circle and select it in the list of visibility options, a blue rectangle labeled “Lifehacker” appears in the +Add box, as shown here.
Writing a post while viewing a circle’s stream
If you write your post while viewing a specific circle’s stream, Google+ automatically puts a blue rectangle representing that circle in the +Add box because it assumes you want to share the post with that circle. If that’s true, then you can just leave the +Add box alone. But if you want to share with more people than just the ones in that circle, click “+Add more people