I was thinking about circles and social media after reading Chris’ post. Google + gave me an opportunity to return to social networking after a lengthy hiatus. While I like the idea of circles, the IA in me struggles with how to classify people. For example, I originally organized people by their relationship to me. Which seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not sensible.
For example, I have a CBC circle for people I work with here. I have a Critical Mass circle for people I know from that job. I have circles for friends, and another for family but it’s not about me. It’s a strange thought since they’re my circles but not all of my friends are interested in video games, or cycling, or painting, or analytics and some are.
For example, if I post that I rode 204km on the weekend and reached speeds of 86+ km/hr who is going to be interested in that information? Other cyclists of course, so does that mean I create a circle for cyclists? Perhaps, but that would mean I would need a circle for each interest or theme of post. I would need to assign each person to a group or multiple groups based on what I know about them.
I’m not really interested in doing this. I already have a spouse and a hard enough time trying to figure out what he’s thinking without worrying about everyone else. Not to mention that I may post only two or three times a day but we all know someone who tweets or posts every thought that pops into their head. 
I block those people, even though I like them and sometimes they have good information. I block them because they create too much noise, and it is hard to pull out the nuggets that are of interest to me. And what each person considers noise is different, so I can’t really say their posts are worthless, they are just worthless to me. So what about a social network that allowed the social to shape what you do and say, you know like in real life.
What if, you were able to subscribe to someone and then select what tags or types of things you are interested in? Then if someone posts about cycling you could get that in your feed, but if they post about their baby daughter’s potty training you could avoid that. I suppose it is a ratio of relevancy to noise but it would let you choose which circles you belong to and account owners could see what circles are forming rather than imposing their own architecture.
Just a thought.
I found your post in search and did not expect much but in the end you hit it right on the head.
This is something I have begged Google for and predicted would occur.
So YES, wholeheartedly, I should not have to make circles, I should see nothing in my Stream as G calls it, but the most popular posts due to the fact that Google already knows what I am interested in after 12 years of my own websites, blogs, social bookmarking at Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 56,000 comments I have posted on other’s blogs.
Yes I should create my own circles, Yes I should post to those circles, Yes I should organize those I follow into Circles.
But, Google needs a front page like Digg and StumbleUpon where I can find the most popular posts without having to add anyone, or follow anyone.
Take a look at Google customized search and Google News, both are customized on the fly by our interests, demographics and our search history.
G+ is failing us without what Google does best, recommend great content to us. Whoever can do that, be it Google, Twitter, Facebook, Digg or StumbleUpon, they will crack the next level of social and news on the web.