He's right in that Facebook was helpful by auto-creating certain "groups" of friends for you based on profile information. Where this completely breaks down is once you move past the trivial task of auto-populating categories for your location, school, and work.
As I see it there are three modes of sharing:
The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes in public.
The second is where my post is pretty irrelevant to most of my friends, and is really only directed at a portion of them. So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up. On the other hand, I rarely care enough to only post to a group instead of public.
The third situation is the opposite of the second: there is a very specific group of people that I don't want to see what I'm about to post. Planning a surprise party or uploading party photos from the night before fall here. In that circumstance I only choose to post to a specific group of close friends. Again, something that Facebook can't deduce from my profile.
You can't get around #3 without doing shit work, except by not posting it to begin with. As a developer you can't avoid this: sometimes manual labor really is the only solution to a problem. Until we invent mind-reading, of course.
Reading your three situations, I have another one which I've been thinking about: a post which is informative and in some way beneficial to the public, but which a significant portion of the people you know simply do not care about.
For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of your non-technical friends, along with your family, in all likelihood do not care about this and will not find it interesting, so it's just noise to them. If you post it publicly, it's worthwhile to the Internet at large, but annoying to a select group. If you post it so that only the relevant individuals see it, and no one else, then the public potentially lose out.
Is there a simple solution here which I'm just not seeing? Is there a social network that deals with this appropriately? With Facebook, you can "unsubscribe", which means hiding a user's posts from your feed, but that seems like overkill. How do prominent developers deal with this? Do they just make their posts more generic and mainstream, and move the technical discussion elsewhere? Or do they just let their non-technical friends and family Deal With It?
Perhaps one solution is to mark a post with "Family don't need to see this", then skip the post for anyone in Family who views their stream/feed/timeline/whatever, probably with an unobtrusive notice which says "post skipped". But then there's added complexity, and — getting back to Zach's main point — it's more shit work.
So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up.
I think Facebook already does this. No, they don't setup actual groups, but the ratio of stuff your friends (and pages you've liked) post to what ends up in your feed is probably 10:1. That might be way off, but the point is that FB is filtering the feed based on your relationship with the person, how often they post, the content of the post, etc. At least this is what I've gleaned from reading about this in various places, but I'd love to be corrected or get more detail if anyone has it.
The author seems to be missing a gigantic point of order here. The reason why Facebook is algorithmically able to determine groups for you is because you, the user, have already entered in fields for Work, School, Location, etc. So the user has had to do a small amount of shit work for Facebook to do its magic.
Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing friends into circles. But G+ does not (yet) have the same kind of parsed personal/profile information, which would require the same mechanism that FB has (deciding who to reveal what parts of your profile to)...and which, as far as I can tell, is not trivial to implement, or to graft on to the existing Google Account structure.
Of course, Google can ALREADY do this for you. No doubt they have mined enough information about each user, including locations of IP addresses, to fill out most of your boilerplate profile info. It doesn't take the EFF to realize the privacy implications of auto-filling your circles with people who don't realize that Google's algorithm has correctly guessed their location, age, school and workplace and is now implicitly exposing such information.
I think that the part where entering your info into Facebook appears less like shit work is that it's typically factual and structured: I worked there, I studied here, these people are family members.
Google +'s circles are completely up-to-you, for better or for worse, and you hit ambiguous parts more quickly: is that guy a friend or an acquaintance? Should I put him in "Tech", "Ruby", both?
But of course, as you go deeper in either product, you'll soon find the same ambiguities and amount of shit work.
Circles have great utility for me for two reasons.
1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things.
2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people.
If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them completely.
I will never ever ever trust an algorithm to get this right, except for the most trivial cases, and if the case is that trivial, I will default to public.
I'd really love for a social network to correctly anticipate all the people i'd like to share something with, and to automagically categorize stuff like that. It'd be sweet.
But it seems like the worst-case scenario if it gets it wrong could be pretty terrible.
He's absolutely right, though, that a key problem with circles and lists and other shit work is that it's very rarely well integrated into the clients.
(I also want disagree with the claim that "no one wants to do shit work". I believe the entire genre of MMORPGs -- even, dare i say, RTS' -- stand as testament against. They also suggest how high peoples tolerance of shit work is if it is well integrated into a client ;)
It's funny because I was sort of nodding along through the beginning. I am one of the very people he mentioned with a bunch of stillborn Twitter lists. But then he went on to reference a Merlin Mann article:
> His main point is that adding an assortment of labels, tags, and priorities to your email inbox only serves to give you the illusion of getting work done.
Which I understand, because Mann has a tendency to get into the fiddly bits, and so do I, but what's missing is that these things do potentially have utility. Case in point: I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of non-spam emails a day. I used to use Apple Mail until it couldn't really handle the volume very well, then I switched to Gmail and learned the keyboard shortcuts. Eventually I got into labels. The UI makes it super easy to apply labels, and I label every important email. This could be considered "shit work", but it provides a solid ROI because it allows me to browse through project summaries, and makes it much less likely for things to slip through the cracks. It's amenable to automation in that I can create rules, but mostly it relies on my ability to tag every single email. It sounds like a lot of work, but once the system is in place it doesn't actually take any time to hit 'l' and autocomplete a label or two.
Meanwhile, Google's attempt to improve productivity without shit work—Priority Inbox—actually provides me negative value. It doesn't matter how good it is because if it's less than perfect I can't trust it, and it can't ever be perfect because countless externalities affect my idea of priorities. In the end, the assigned ratings become more noise that I have to deal with.
So while the point about not letting busy-work make you feel productive is a valid warning, it doesn't follow that if it can't be automated it isn't useful. It's all about ROI. I think the problem with Twitter and Google+ is that they just aren't useful enough to sink that much time into unless there is a direct professional purpose.
I disagree with one point. Priority Inbox tells me which email subjects to skim and which to open every time. For the few important emails that make it into the non-important bucket, skimming the subjects always brings them out. However, EVERY email in my important inbox is important (I haven't had to mark one as unimportant for months). When I sit down to go through email (2-3 times a day) I read everything in the priority inbox because I trust that.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't understand the compulsion to post potentially embarassing information about yourself on the Internet.
I can't believe people are arguing about the right way to do this.
Twenty years ago, it was rare for someone to call everyone they ever knew and scream into the phone how drunk they were. I might have done that only once or twice in my life. (If I called you by mistake and woke you up at 2AM, I apologize.)
But today, if you can't provide a web-based service that not only allows you to do that very thing but protects you from the consequences of it, people will complain.
I think you are confusing push and pull communication. Twitter does not ring up every single person on the planet whenever I share something, but what I share does appear in their feed once they care to check.
If it were push communication, you'd be right to complain, but since it is pull communication, other rules of etiquette apply.
Sometime shitwork can be a very good way to find new possibilities. A lot of people do shitwork that's immensely useful, like editors on Wikipedia, moderators on reddit and forums, people who enter all the data into imdb. I don't see how those people could be replaced by algorithms with what we know now.
Sometime shitwork needs to be done because you can't simplify. I'm doubtful that Facebook's auto-group feature would work for me. Maybe me doing shitwork on Google+ is what work for me, because I value my freedom to control my information online.
When Google+ released, I remember being somewhat confused that they opted for user defined Circles rather than using user relations as a gauge for friend "closeness". As the author of this blog post points out, users almost never want to get stuck placing hundreds of people in groups that could change at any time.
In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line:
"Although users of online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit groups."
I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.
By pushing the privacy aspect of Google+ it allowed Google to differentiate themselves compared to Facebook. That message has persisted.
Users say they care heavily about privacy, but in practice they don't[1]. Circles isn't a bad solution to that, except for the small minority of people who feel the pressure try to build themselves a compete categorisation of everyone they know.
[1] Occasionally people do care - picture sharing is one case where people are somewhat careful. Circles caters to that case quite well.
But, but... I like putting my friends into Venn diagrams.
Seriously. The 1 click it takes to put someone is a circle isn't really "work", and if it saves me awkward calls from my mom because she read a post intended for my drinking buddies, then it was well worth it.
I agree. But the author is making a point about how justified these features are and how arbitrary they can be for users. Personally, I never distinguish who I publish statuses too. But I can understand why that's a useful feature. And he DID praise that feature for Facebook.
What he isn't praising is when a user compulsively uses a feature which is superfluous. A huge assortment of different tags and labels in email isn't really justified. Sure, you can find a use for it. But most users arguably organize their entire mailbox into these neat categories, and thereafter, half of them are never used again.
I disagree. I like being able to set filters and granularity. I like having the option to give me the information I want, in the way I want it. I'm prepared to do the extra up-front setup to get the better end experience; I have hundreds of filters set up on my email, for example.
Don't give me forced simplicity; give me the option to tune it to my needs and give it the power to make it actually useful.
It's not about simplicity vs. complexity, or whether complex features are A Bad Thing. It's about matching complexity with utility. You shouldn't force your users to do a bunch of work (in this case building Google+ Circles or Twitter Lists) and then under utilize that investment of user time.
Absolutely right. I am finding that, especially with mobile, you have to really think about the design so that shit work is cut to a minimum. For example, I am in the process of making an iOS app, but it interfaces with an external appliance. I don't want to ask the user to input host, port, etc., so instead I'd much rather do the extra leg work and implement uPnP detection and then ask the user as a last resort. Apple has figured this out. 70% is in your face while the rest is within hands reach.
As an analogy, Circles is driving users to a brick wall hoping they will climb over to see what is the big deal is. Assuming they care. Assuming they aren't in the middle of something when they get the invite.
Which makes me think about the "Find My Friends" App on iOS. If Apple flipped the "social" switch, they would have creatively acquired a power which no other social network would be able to grasp without huge privacy backlash - knowledge of where you and all of your friends are at any given time. Here's the sell: You already have the app. How does this relate to shit work? Well, you'd be apart of a social network where you, your friends are already members, your latest photos are already there (iCloud), you know where your friends are and what they are doing - and you did very little work.
Agreed. This is the primary reason I don't use Google+. I haven't got the time or inclination to split people into groups or even figure out what those groups might be. I did try but found it a taxing process.
Automatically coming up with criteria to filter by is a great solution. I'd love if I could send a tweet just to my UK followers or to those who tweet about "Ruby" a lot. This is all easily solved by machines and doesn't require me to do anything by hand.
> Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.
This made me laugh.
I half-agree with the post. There is an element of "shit work" that actually makes users feel engaged. For instance, my iGoogle homepage has feeds set up with sites I've had to hunt down an RSS for and manually enter. I've had to invest time into rearranging the layout to my priorities.
It's 'shit work' in that it's manual and somewhat trial-and-error, but it leaves me feeling more invested in the product if I'm ultimately more satisfied with the end result.
Disclaimer: I am a PC/ubuntu guy, so I understand that mine may not be the mainstream opinion.
I use twitter lists, in part because Tweetdeck makes them easy to view. I like to follow the various food trucks around town, but usually I am only interested in them when hungry. Having them collected in a list keeps them out of my main feed.
One under-appreciated feature of lists is that they can also be followed. For example someone else could follow your carefully-cultivated list of food trucks! (I do this with someone else's list :) )
I think there are 2 camps of users - I'd rather organize my own lists than trust Facebook to do it for me. I honestly don't trust Facebook to do it...
The author of the article hasn't completely thought this through though. He's saying it's shit work which Facebook automates for you but then he goes on to say relationships are complicated and some people are in overlapping "circles."
He shoots himself in the foot right there. Facebook's auto-populated groups can't figure out the complicated nature of our relationships with people. I have many shades of friends and people who have varied interests even within those shades of friends. It's too hard for an algorithm to be able to deduce this very human aspect of relationships.
This article makes no sense... You are rightly pointing out that it takes some effort to maintain your privacy and think about managing your circles of friends on G+ and then you compare it with nothing that provides that ability on Facebook. Yes, thinking is hard. If you are ok with saying everything to everybody then you don't have to do it. But Facebook making a few broad automated groups for you solves none of the problems you describe... How does Facebook know who you want to share your drinking stories with? At least Google puts it up front and makes it part of the whole fabric of their product... you always think about circles... just like in freaking real life.
[+] [-] Pewpewarrows|14 years ago|reply
As I see it there are three modes of sharing:
The first is where my post is quite innocent and generic, so I just want to declare it to the world. This goes in public.
The second is where my post is pretty irrelevant to most of my friends, and is really only directed at a portion of them. So to prevent clogging the feeds of the rest of my friends, I submit it to a specific group like "Biking Buddies." Facebook can't learn this or automatically set it up. On the other hand, I rarely care enough to only post to a group instead of public.
The third situation is the opposite of the second: there is a very specific group of people that I don't want to see what I'm about to post. Planning a surprise party or uploading party photos from the night before fall here. In that circumstance I only choose to post to a specific group of close friends. Again, something that Facebook can't deduce from my profile.
You can't get around #3 without doing shit work, except by not posting it to begin with. As a developer you can't avoid this: sometimes manual labor really is the only solution to a problem. Until we invent mind-reading, of course.
[+] [-] aprescott|14 years ago|reply
For example, you may have an excellent piece of commentary about the history of Unix and the state of X, Y, Z in modern operating system design. Most of your non-technical friends, along with your family, in all likelihood do not care about this and will not find it interesting, so it's just noise to them. If you post it publicly, it's worthwhile to the Internet at large, but annoying to a select group. If you post it so that only the relevant individuals see it, and no one else, then the public potentially lose out.
Is there a simple solution here which I'm just not seeing? Is there a social network that deals with this appropriately? With Facebook, you can "unsubscribe", which means hiding a user's posts from your feed, but that seems like overkill. How do prominent developers deal with this? Do they just make their posts more generic and mainstream, and move the technical discussion elsewhere? Or do they just let their non-technical friends and family Deal With It?
Perhaps one solution is to mark a post with "Family don't need to see this", then skip the post for anyone in Family who views their stream/feed/timeline/whatever, probably with an unobtrusive notice which says "post skipped". But then there's added complexity, and — getting back to Zach's main point — it's more shit work.
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|14 years ago|reply
I think Facebook already does this. No, they don't setup actual groups, but the ratio of stuff your friends (and pages you've liked) post to what ends up in your feed is probably 10:1. That might be way off, but the point is that FB is filtering the feed based on your relationship with the person, how often they post, the content of the post, etc. At least this is what I've gleaned from reading about this in various places, but I'd love to be corrected or get more detail if anyone has it.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danso|14 years ago|reply
Of course, that's a very small amount of work relative to manually placing friends into circles. But G+ does not (yet) have the same kind of parsed personal/profile information, which would require the same mechanism that FB has (deciding who to reveal what parts of your profile to)...and which, as far as I can tell, is not trivial to implement, or to graft on to the existing Google Account structure.
Of course, Google can ALREADY do this for you. No doubt they have mined enough information about each user, including locations of IP addresses, to fill out most of your boilerplate profile info. It doesn't take the EFF to realize the privacy implications of auto-filling your circles with people who don't realize that Google's algorithm has correctly guessed their location, age, school and workplace and is now implicitly exposing such information.
[+] [-] Timothee|14 years ago|reply
Google +'s circles are completely up-to-you, for better or for worse, and you hit ambiguous parts more quickly: is that guy a friend or an acquaintance? Should I put him in "Tech", "Ruby", both?
But of course, as you go deeper in either product, you'll soon find the same ambiguities and amount of shit work.
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
Circles have great utility for me for two reasons.
1. Like Twitter lists (which I use, thanks Tweetdeck), I want to see information from certain groups of people for different things.
2. I want to disseminate different types of information to different groups of people.
If you don't find either of these use-cases compelling, there is nothing stopping you from ignoring them completely.
I will never ever ever trust an algorithm to get this right, except for the most trivial cases, and if the case is that trivial, I will default to public.
I think ultimately the problem is that these features are trying to replicate offline social context, but only getting halfway there. I've written more about this: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-perfo...
[+] [-] bodegajed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seigenblues|14 years ago|reply
He's absolutely right, though, that a key problem with circles and lists and other shit work is that it's very rarely well integrated into the clients.
(I also want disagree with the claim that "no one wants to do shit work". I believe the entire genre of MMORPGs -- even, dare i say, RTS' -- stand as testament against. They also suggest how high peoples tolerance of shit work is if it is well integrated into a client ;)
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeromeparadis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
> His main point is that adding an assortment of labels, tags, and priorities to your email inbox only serves to give you the illusion of getting work done.
Which I understand, because Mann has a tendency to get into the fiddly bits, and so do I, but what's missing is that these things do potentially have utility. Case in point: I get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of non-spam emails a day. I used to use Apple Mail until it couldn't really handle the volume very well, then I switched to Gmail and learned the keyboard shortcuts. Eventually I got into labels. The UI makes it super easy to apply labels, and I label every important email. This could be considered "shit work", but it provides a solid ROI because it allows me to browse through project summaries, and makes it much less likely for things to slip through the cracks. It's amenable to automation in that I can create rules, but mostly it relies on my ability to tag every single email. It sounds like a lot of work, but once the system is in place it doesn't actually take any time to hit 'l' and autocomplete a label or two.
Meanwhile, Google's attempt to improve productivity without shit work—Priority Inbox—actually provides me negative value. It doesn't matter how good it is because if it's less than perfect I can't trust it, and it can't ever be perfect because countless externalities affect my idea of priorities. In the end, the assigned ratings become more noise that I have to deal with.
So while the point about not letting busy-work make you feel productive is a valid warning, it doesn't follow that if it can't be automated it isn't useful. It's all about ROI. I think the problem with Twitter and Google+ is that they just aren't useful enough to sink that much time into unless there is a direct professional purpose.
[+] [-] josh33|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drblast|14 years ago|reply
I can't believe people are arguing about the right way to do this.
Twenty years ago, it was rare for someone to call everyone they ever knew and scream into the phone how drunk they were. I might have done that only once or twice in my life. (If I called you by mistake and woke you up at 2AM, I apologize.)
But today, if you can't provide a web-based service that not only allows you to do that very thing but protects you from the consequences of it, people will complain.
[+] [-] skore|14 years ago|reply
If it were push communication, you'd be right to complain, but since it is pull communication, other rules of etiquette apply.
[+] [-] henryprecheur|14 years ago|reply
Sometime shitwork needs to be done because you can't simplify. I'm doubtful that Facebook's auto-group feature would work for me. Maybe me doing shitwork on Google+ is what work for me, because I value my freedom to control my information online.
[+] [-] Permit|14 years ago|reply
In fact, one Google Research paper[1] opens with the line: "Although users of online communication tools rarely categorize their contacts into groups such as "family", coworkers", or "jogging buddies", they nonetheless implicitly cluster contacts, by virtue of their interactions with them, forming implicit groups."
I'm curious what the eleven authors of this paper thought as they saw their Google co-workers developing a system they knew couldn't work.
[1]Suggesting (More) Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...)
[+] [-] nl|14 years ago|reply
By pushing the privacy aspect of Google+ it allowed Google to differentiate themselves compared to Facebook. That message has persisted.
Users say they care heavily about privacy, but in practice they don't[1]. Circles isn't a bad solution to that, except for the small minority of people who feel the pressure try to build themselves a compete categorisation of everyone they know.
[1] Occasionally people do care - picture sharing is one case where people are somewhat careful. Circles caters to that case quite well.
[+] [-] michaelchisari|14 years ago|reply
That anecdote is not really worth much. Especially because those lists are probably very important for those who do use them.
Most people won't care about filtering their social relationships, until they do care. At that point, you want them to have the option.
[+] [-] pud|14 years ago|reply
Many developers obsess over the edge-case of "how do I post secret information that is only shown to the correct list?"
When in fact, normal people just want to post "Going to Aunt Edna's tomorrow!" to their family list, because it's irrelevant to non-family.
It seems Facebook agrees, with their loosey-goosey smart lists.
[+] [-] lukev|14 years ago|reply
Seriously. The 1 click it takes to put someone is a circle isn't really "work", and if it saves me awkward calls from my mom because she read a post intended for my drinking buddies, then it was well worth it.
[+] [-] dylangs1030|14 years ago|reply
What he isn't praising is when a user compulsively uses a feature which is superfluous. A huge assortment of different tags and labels in email isn't really justified. Sure, you can find a use for it. But most users arguably organize their entire mailbox into these neat categories, and thereafter, half of them are never used again.
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfasdf3|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eftpotrm|14 years ago|reply
I disagree. I like being able to set filters and granularity. I like having the option to give me the information I want, in the way I want it. I'm prepared to do the extra up-front setup to get the better end experience; I have hundreds of filters set up on my email, for example.
Don't give me forced simplicity; give me the option to tune it to my needs and give it the power to make it actually useful.
[+] [-] jakemcgraw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nplusone|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomlin|14 years ago|reply
As an analogy, Circles is driving users to a brick wall hoping they will climb over to see what is the big deal is. Assuming they care. Assuming they aren't in the middle of something when they get the invite.
Which makes me think about the "Find My Friends" App on iOS. If Apple flipped the "social" switch, they would have creatively acquired a power which no other social network would be able to grasp without huge privacy backlash - knowledge of where you and all of your friends are at any given time. Here's the sell: You already have the app. How does this relate to shit work? Well, you'd be apart of a social network where you, your friends are already members, your latest photos are already there (iCloud), you know where your friends are and what they are doing - and you did very little work.
[+] [-] petercooper|14 years ago|reply
Automatically coming up with criteria to filter by is a great solution. I'd love if I could send a tweet just to my UK followers or to those who tweet about "Ruby" a lot. This is all easily solved by machines and doesn't require me to do anything by hand.
[+] [-] eric-hu|14 years ago|reply
This made me laugh.
I half-agree with the post. There is an element of "shit work" that actually makes users feel engaged. For instance, my iGoogle homepage has feeds set up with sites I've had to hunt down an RSS for and manually enter. I've had to invest time into rearranging the layout to my priorities.
It's 'shit work' in that it's manual and somewhat trial-and-error, but it leaves me feeling more invested in the product if I'm ultimately more satisfied with the end result.
Disclaimer: I am a PC/ubuntu guy, so I understand that mine may not be the mainstream opinion.
[+] [-] dprice1|14 years ago|reply
They are a pain to maintain, however.
[+] [-] sehugg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajpatel|14 years ago|reply
The author of the article hasn't completely thought this through though. He's saying it's shit work which Facebook automates for you but then he goes on to say relationships are complicated and some people are in overlapping "circles."
He shoots himself in the foot right there. Facebook's auto-populated groups can't figure out the complicated nature of our relationships with people. I have many shades of friends and people who have varied interests even within those shades of friends. It's too hard for an algorithm to be able to deduce this very human aspect of relationships.
[+] [-] 23u7890s7df|14 years ago|reply