The Google+ project: Circles

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper, or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.
Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.
In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.
We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life, we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food — wrapping everyone in “friend” paper — and sharing really suffers:
It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time.
It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 “friends”) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright.
It’s insensitive. We all define “friend” and “family” differently — in our own way, on our own terms — but we lose this nuance online.
In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time — with their circles.
From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: We brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new — just like any other day.