Google+. Screaming out for a circle management tool

So, I’m really hooked on Google+.

Yeah, I know it doesn’t have the reach of Facebook, or the simplicity of Twitter, but I like the complete package, especially the mobile and tablet apps.

However, I really am frustrated with Circles.

When the platform launched over a year ago, I dived in and created lots of circles, that I thought I would need, with my own random taxonomy.

So how many of those circles do I fire bespoke posts at?

Two.

Apart from “public” I send the occasional post to a “Latitude” circle, and personal thoughts and photos to my “family” circle. That’s it. So why do I have 18 circles?

I basically got it wrong. When I first signed up, I created these groups like lists in twitter so I could choose to filter my feed according to the kind of news/information I wanted to see. In reality G+ does a poor job of letting to view multiple feeds…you can’t event set a home page feed other than “all”.

The real aim of circles is for the user to post differing content to different audiences so my family don’t see a load of industry speak, and my peers don’t see pictures of me hanging out with the family at Disney World.

So all my circles are wrong. What I really need are just a few circles:Industry, SAScon,  and non-industry. the problem is it’s a real pain to go and create these groups again now I have a few hundred people in circles.

Somebody needs to create a circle management tool that allows me to duplicate, merge and split other circles. I understand the Google+ API is a bit limited in this respect and, so far, very few third parties are supplying apps for the platform. This guy already had a go at it until he got shut down

Google’s acquisition of Katango hints at Google’s plans to deliver this functionality themselves, but I’m sure it falls into a queue with a lot of other funky functionality.

I was recently in Mountain View (here’s the photo to prove it) and there were discussion about G+ rolling out a new desktop iteration everyday and moving more into LinkedIn space first, so we might not see it for a while yet.

So…do you like Circles and am I just talking rubbish?

  outletsukco