Stowe Boyd

[…] there’s still the giant hurdle of the social network’s user retention. It’s one thing to get people to register for the service, but it’s an entirely different headache to keep them on the network — to create active users, in other words. “I think they’re going to have an issue with real activation,” says Gallette. “To take off, and hit that 750 million user mark, people are going to have to pay a lot less attention to Facebook, and a lot more attention to Google Plus.”

Unfortunately, one of its biggest differentiators, which initially attracted users to the service—Google+ Circles—may also be one of the network’s biggest turnoffs.

The issue with Circles, the feature that enables users to categorize their friends into various social groups, is fatigue. If you’re a member of the services, it’s likely you’ve already received dozens and dozens of adds from acquaintances on the network. Many found that it was initially fun to classify these contacts into groups, especially with a slick UI designed by ex-Apple “wizard” Andy Hertzfeld. But soon, some found the fun task became a chore. “I fell in love with the interface as soon as I got it, but I did realize that I’m going to end up with too many circles,” Gallate says. “I can see there being limitations in managing large number of Circles, despite how good [Google’s] promotional videos are. I can see I’m going to get to a point where I might’ve been a little bit too clever with the number of Circles I started.”

George Gallette, cited by Austin Carr in Circles Fatigue: The Dark Side Of Google+

(h/t mediafuturist)

As I wrote recently (see Is The Juice Worth The Squeeze?):

I am not a fan of Twitter lists, for example, but others use them productively to subset their Twitter experience. So I suppose the same logic will hold with Circles: if you are trying to partition your social experience into separate fragments within a large general purpose tool, Circles may hold some promise for you.

But because the folks you add to your Circles are not in on the taxonomy you are using, there is no shared context: it’s not a little cocktail party where all the guests are aware they’ve been invited, and know who the others are. It’s a one-sided filter, and so no shared context or conversation can arise. Circles are like cutting out pieces of books by different authors, pasting them together, and pretending it happened at a salon.

We’ll see.