I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days and have been very happy with it. It’s really a great social network, but I’ll refrain from rehashing the same things everyone has been saying. You can Google it yourself.
One of the things Google+ has been slated to be is a Twitter replacement, in which you can follow others without them following you by adding them to a circle.
However, if you previously shared something with all your circles (or intend to do so in the future) now the people you’re following can see these things too, something you may have not intended to happen. After all, they’re not your friends. Not even acquaintances.
For me this is a flaw in the current circles implementation. At the least I would like to be able to share things with all my circles except for some of them (e.g. “my circles minus the Follow circle”.) However, this does not fix things for historical posts, which I already shared with all my circles as you can’t change the sharing settings of a post after it’s been posted. With the current implementation I’m left with the only option of specifying each and every circle I intend to share with for every post, and if in the future I’ll have new circles – they won’t be able to see these posts.
Another way to fix this is to allow defining “following circles”, so that stuff you share with your circles (or even your extended circles), still won’t be shared with them.
Maybe I’m wrong. Let me know if I jumped the gun here.
(Second try)
You have two options:
1. Wait for Google to implement the feature you want.
2. Write your own Google+ app that generates circles using rules, such as: “all my circles minus the assholes.” :)
If some is in your ‘following’ circle, but you’re not in his, he will not see your post on his stream. He will see it in the incoming. The incoming is a different ball game.
I like it.
udim: Google+ app? Sounds like a good idea. But do you think it will solve the following? Let’s say you have two groups of circles – those you share your stuff with and those you don’t. If you add a circle in the future – to which group will it belong? Because I might want the people in the new circle to see my previous posts. Will an app be able to dynamically share (or not share) historical posts with new circles?
Albert: But what if I want to follow someone without him being able to see my previous posts (aimed at “My Circles”) that were not meant for him? I can’t, because he can now go into my profile and see everything. Also, now for every post I have to pick specific circles and I can never use the special groups “Your Circles” or “Your Extended Circles”
You’re right. Following someone doesn’t mean he is in your ‘circle’.