I’m in total limbo when it comes to Google and my friends
Google Plus delivered a new way to classify your friends (although it was first seen in diaspora’s aspects) but I was using Gmail’s Contacts with the tagging previously.
What this boils down to is Taxonomy vs Folksonomy and credit goes to Stowe Boyd, Thomas Wanderwal and others.
I’ve been thinking about the merits of both approaches and concluded that even if Google included the ability to have circles within circles, it wouldn’t be as flexible as a purely tagging/folksonomy based system. The problem seems to center around classifying friends and people full stop. Categories, Circles or rather Taxonomy’s are too ridged and forced. Which to be frank classifying your relationship with people isn’t.
I refer to this table…
| Taxonomy | Folksonomy |
| Brittle | Flexible |
| Accurate (if done well) | Less reliable |
| Compliance must be forced | Rewards but doesn’t force compliance |
| Hard to add to | Easy to add to |
| Centrally controlled | Democratically controlled |
| Predictable | Organic |
The attributes of Folksonomies sound a lot closer to the emergent nature of relationships than Taxonomies.
There is a question which remains however… What happens if Google do adopt Circles within Circles? Or even follow the Twitter lists way of doing things?
Hopefully Google will adopt their own Gmail folksonomy approach in the future, but it does looks very unlikely…?
