At that point I guess I could have just removed them all, but I made the fatal time sinking mistake of starting to sort them and then getting sucked right in! Although it has taken an insane amount of time, and something I know almost all my RL contacts and the average joe would never do, I've managed to go through over half of them now and sort them into interests.
Was this a waste of time? I don't think so. When these social networks open, we often do an initial scouring for contact frenzy, add a slew of contacts and gradually drift into a normalcy within the initial circles we discovered. It's not often we go on another discovery phase because it simply takes way too much time. So this move to Google+, and accidental addition of everyone in my initial contact & suggestion list allowed me to do another shake up of my contacts and discover a whole bunch of very interesting and dynamic profiles I would never have discovered otherwise.
However the following questions still remain:
- How am I going to fit this into my information gathering workflow along with GReader, Facebook & Twitter?
- How much noise and redundancy will quite likely exist between the posts I currently read on these other platforms and G+? As a start, I think I'd like to ditch Twitter, but there are a number of contacts I would need to see ported over to G+ before that happens; and G+ is still early early days.
- I really need Google to merge Buzz with G+ and get that API firing on all cylinders so some of my third party apps can bring G+ into the fold, along with some options for including GReader....although maybe that link needs some serious restructuring to avoid the obvious redundancy that will occur.
- Do I still keep a personal & professional google account for social interaction? I am an instructor and therefore need to be very conscious of my digital footprint. However, there are often very interesting posts that are of personal interest that I would love to interact with, but may not be quite appropriate (although not significantly damaging either) for some of my students or work colleagues to be privy to. Are circles enough to maintain this separation? I still don't think so.
- Of course can't leave out the very common complaint about having better control and managing posts with huge numbers of comments. It really would be awesome to have the option of limiting the view/notifications of future comments to just people in your circles.
Anyway, I'm gonna still be playing with this product significantly for the next few weeks and am looking forward to watching the constant evolution of this product over the next few months.
