I was reading +Zee M Kane's post on Re-sharing on G+ needs a rethink and I got completely side tracked into how I am still struggling with streams. I love, I'll say it again, I love Google plus' approach to security and privacy. The biggest breaking point to security probably is sharing, which allows one to re-publish someone's content wider than they might have intended. Today there is a friendly pop-up. In most cases that will probably be fine. In the remote case where a techno-paparazzi befriends someone and harvest there information just for monetary gain, a security measure probably won't help much as someone can just do a copy and paste or screenshot and get all the information they want to share anyway. In the majority of other cases it might be helpful to add a "Do not allow this to be shared beyond my original group" option, but I worry with too many additional security features it might become overwhelming for users. Personally I would love to have it as an option as it would allow me, the content creator, to put a restriction on the max-set of receivers of the content from the start. Others could re-share, but it would still only be 'seen' by people in both of our groups, with mine being the limiting boundary.
Fundamentally I think the intersection between Circles and Streams is great. In my use of the tools in the field trial I can see a few things I struggle with that I think could be solutionioned a few ways. But ultimately I think they should be tweaked in one way or another.
First, the on/off binary approach to a post and its stream availability is an easy design solution, but doesn't allow flexibility and I think also doesn't scale very well. Today if I post a story publicly and user Joe has me in their Trail Running circle, that is helpful only in as much as if my post is related to our areas of common interest in running. If I post about my work or something related to technology that user just got spammed with something off topic. The only limit is an on/off decision on if they have access to the material, not if it is relevant. Today I rarely share things publicly because I don't want to spam off-topic content to my interest-specific groups.
Here is one way it could work instead:
Separate the difference between something being publicly viewable from the notion it should be in someone's stream. The easiest way to do this is represent "releasability" of content in one section and "stream-to" in another. Kludgy, yeah, but hopefully it could be implemented smoothly. I have lots of posts which I don't mind being public, but I don't put them public because I don't want circle bleed-over. That is the only reason. If I could mark things 'public' and then say publish to stream "Trail Runner" then I'm solid. Others that wanted to know what I was into or cyber-stalk me could go to my profile and look at my posts. But my post written to and about "Trail Runners" would only show up in their stream.
Alternatively if I could publish to +Public and the limit which streams saw it or didn't see it directly by honoring the circle tags it could still be done with the same UI designed. A piece of content with +Public, +Technologist, and +Photographers would make the content releasable to everyone but only streamed to my Technologists and Photographers circles. Alternatively an +Public, -Friends, -Family designation would publish it very widely and only exclude the content from showing up in the streams of my Friends and Family circles.
Today it seems they have combined two very different things for simplicity and elegance, relesability and stream presentation. I think these are very different things. I think I should want the ability to publish a nature photo of a mountain trail both to Trail Runners and Photographers in their streams, but no one else, and yet still have it be public if a stranger or a technologist wants to dig into my interests for whatever reason.
If I do really want to hide out with some friends or colleagues then those two functional areas will probably be the same. But in this case the previously mentioned option of being able to restrict sharing only to the original release group would be quite helpful. I actually think the primary design driver shouldn't be to solve this particular small edge-case. It fits perfectly now, but I'm not so sure the secondary effects of this design decision don't challenge its underlying assumptions rather significantly.
I think they are really really close, but not there yet. However it gets solved, I appreciate the hard work and hope for the future. I'm glad Google is keeping this trial open and public. Their communication is outstanding. Thanks to the following for doing such a good job keeping us in the loop on the G+ release and changes: +Vic Gundotra, +Bradley Horowitz, +Natalie Villalobos, and many others listed here, who I also follow http://socialsunil.com/list-of-google-plus-profile
