Google+ is public performance art. ‘Privacy’ amounts to preventing random members of the audience from heckling.

As for real privacy:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F

I don’t know how many of you gentle readers have ever had a deranged online stalker. If you had, you’d not lightly – if ever again – put real name and background up for the universe to trawl over.
What would you do? Enter a silent order of nuns/monks and never speak on the Net again?

I look at the names of posters in this thread. These might or might not be your real names. It does not matter. Your opinions are just as valid no matter what the label is.

But on a grander scale, the article as a whole misses the mark by thinking that Google+ is like Facebook at all. G+, although a social network on its face, is actually about conquering the world, and it’s doing a pretty darn good job of that. G+ is about bringing everything you do on the web to one place, and that one place is now controlled by Google.

Fortunately, I’m okay with this because I really like Google. In the earliest days of G+, watching users live edit a Google Doc being created to teach people to use G+, watching the doc shared and spread through people’s streams, watching photos uploaded directly into the cloud via Picasa (now Google Photo), one could see a much bigger picture unfolding. That picture doesn’t need to be like facebook or replace facebook. It’s something entirely different…much much bigger than Facebook.

I wonder if you have been reading the comments people have made about your posts. Your comments here also don’t make sense. Putting friends into circles doesn’t take time because you add them when those friends are added not some type of chore you do at month end or when you have 1,000 friends.

Facebook list is hard and a chore because the Lists are not readily seen and by the time you get around to it, you are already 500 friends deep.

Yes, the asymmetric relationship exists in Google+ where people can follow you as they would on Twitter. Like Twitter, if I post anything publicly, I expect comments from anyone and everyone–a public forum.

From there, I can escalate the relationship to make it reciprocal, adding my encircler into one of my circles. This would give them access to information I post to only one of my circles, much like when I decide to post on Facebook and not Twitter.

Taking this a step further, If I want this person to only see my public and professional persona, I can put them in the appropriate circle, preventing them from seeing my personal side. This would replicate the effect of posting to LinkedIn without posting to Twitter and Facebook.

If the person is a good friend, I can add them to a circle of only my bestest friend, replacing networks like Path.

And, get this, let’s just say that someone who encircles you happens to be a coworker who is also a close friend, you can add him to all three circles–the “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” and “Path” privacy settings–so that he can see all aspects of your online social life, since he’d be in those social circles in real life, too. What a concept!

Furthermore, if you’re a power-user, Google Circles are an integrated list, so you can share stuff about, say, local monster truck rallies to only people you know would care.

And yes, I concede that creating and managing all these circles can be exhausting, but I figure that you’re already taking that kind of trouble if you’re *that* concerned about privacy! The only two features I wish Google would add would be the ability to make circles public so people can opt-in, like updates from niche subjects for professionals, and the ability to subtract a circle so that everyone BUT that circle can see an update. Otherwise, though, I see Google’s Circles as a work of genius–an online reflection of how we truly interact IRL…I hope you can better explain that in the future!