Circles of Life

We have talked a lot about circles in the past - no surprise, since Google+ has circles as a core feature. Today we're going to discuss two approaches to circle management - how you create circles, who you put in them, and how you use them. Remember that nobody will ever know what circle they're in unless you tell them.

Theme Circles

The method that Google seems to suggest is that you break up your circles by theme. These themes are somewhat broad - friends, family, and a generic "following" circle. This makes senese when you want to use circles as a way to share private things to different groups - so you can share photos of your party with your friends, but your family and coworkers don't need to know. You can invite your coworkers to a meeting, which doesn't make any sense for your friends. If you have particular themes that you talk about that others may not be interested in (for example, if you're a big Twilight fan), theme circles are also a good way to just keep your chatter to yourself. Most of these circles will have the same "volume" - the default setting will make sure you get the messages you want, but you may wish to adjust the volume of some of them. We've discussed volumes in an earlier post.

There are downsides to this, of course. The biggest is that just because someone is in your "knitting" circle doesn't mean that all they do is knit - they may talk endlessly about a movie that you're not interested in. But thats how friends can be sometimes, isn't it?

Watch Circles

Another popular strategy is to setup circles based on how much you want to hear from different people. So you might setup a circle called "volume low", set its volume to a very low level, and put people into it who occasionally have interesting things to say, but are generally too chatty. Other people say things that you never want to miss, so you may have a "volume high" circle for them. And there are a few people who, if they ever post, you want to make sure you know immediately - and you can put them in a "notify" circle, and set the volume accordingly.

This also has some downsides, although it works fairly well for people who post publicly, it doesn't always work well for private messaging.

What is the Best Method?

Both of course! You may need to find a mix and some circles and volume settings that work best for you, but here is a strategy that combines the best of both worlds:

Create theme circles that you primarily will use to *send* messages. So you know that when you need to send a message to your college buddies, you can send it to the "College" circle and be reasonably assured that they'll see it if they're interested.  These circles will likely have the volume set to "off", although for some circles you may want to set the volume higher.

Then create a watch circle, and add everyone to one of these circles if you want to hear from them. This way you can determine what level of interest you have in each one. If you find someone is getting more spammy, you can put them in a lower volume circle. If someone is particularly interesting - move them up! You can move them right from their hovercard, so you don't have to break your stride when reading messages.

People can be in more than one circle, and Google will pick an individual volume based on the highest volume circle they're in. So it is safe to put a person in a circle whose volume is off to categorize them, and then also put them in a volume circle to adjust how much you want to hear from them. This is a good balance of both tools.

There are other strategies, and you may want to adjust the specific way you balance these, but give this a try and see if it helps you find and interact with the people and messages you most want to.