Rethinking Lists, Groups and Circles

The recent introduction of Google+ has been fodder for much Google-versus-Facebook discussion. At the center of the discussion has been the Circles component of Google+, which allows users to arrange their contacts in meaningful clusters (for example, “family” and “work”) and share different content with different clusters. Circles play a role that’s almost entirely analogous to Facebook’s lists, which have been around (if somewhat buried in the Facebook UI) for a long time. Facebook of course also has the notion of groups, separate from (and more recent than) lists. Here are some basic observations on lists, groups and circles that seem to have been glossed over in the various recent articles.

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