Social Networks Google Circles

Just read an article that Google has a social network site in the works called Circles. Ugh, not another social network. First I was on MySpace with a few relatives. All these other little networks kept popping up: Bebo, Friendster, CafeMom, Classmates.com, delicious, digg, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yuwie, etc. Then all my friends on MySpace migrated to Facebook, so I quit MySpace. I thought it was cool to be able to customize your background and add music to MySpace, but with a dial up connection, it started getting really painful to load profile pages, and it got kind of boring.
Facebook was clean, although boring compared to MySpace backgrounds, but it loaded quickly. The newsfeed was cool with everyone’s updates all in one place and pretty much everyone I’ve ever known is on there.
Then I joined Twitteras part of how to drive traffic to my blogs. It’s also a good way to keep up with people you’ll most likely never meet, but share common interests with.
One functionality that Circles is supposed to have that Facebook and Twitter lack are creating circles of friends, so that you can create a circle of high school friends, work friends, drinking friends, etc. When you post an update, you can choose who sees it. You can sort of do this with Facebook, but it’s painful. In Facebook, from status update box you can manually enter the names of who sees the status or doesn’t see it by clicking the lock next to the share button. Very time consuming if you have a lot of friends. Facebook has a group option which is a similar concept which lets you send a status update to a group, but you have to go click on the group to enter it and then enter your status update. A little awkward. Would be better if you could select the group from the regular status update box on your profile.
With Twitter, you can’t censor your status update at all. You can group people into lists, but tweets get sent to all of your followers. It would be nice if you could group people into lists and then select a list to send tweets to.
Google Circles might do great, but I’d just prefer that Facebook and Twitter add this additional functionality to their sites instead of having to join a brand new site, just so I can select who to send an update to.

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