Targeted Sharing via Google+ Circles

Like many of you, I have a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, a Facebook account, and I have my tweets go to LinkedIn and Facebook so that I can lazily update everyone when I have something to say.  The resulting stream ends up being pretty spammy and unfocused, and so I post much less frequently than I might.  My “regular” friends feel like I’m super spammy, and my “geeky” friends complain they never hear from me.  This is exactly the kind of problem that G+ circles should be able to solve.

For this reason, and also because I love mashing stuff up, I can’t wait until G+ releases their APIs.  I want to build (or use) integrations with other systems so I don’t spend all my life bouncing from social network to social network – or pretending to engage in them by tossing messages over from other systems.

I’d love to have a LinkedIn circle, a Twitter circle, and a Facebook circle, so when I share something that I intend for my LinkedIn audience I can just add them and it’ll appear in my LinkedIn stream.   Now that I have G+ I don’t spend much time at all on Facebook (although I do on LinkedIn) and I feel a little guilty .  G+ could add this integration themselves, or third party developers (like me) could create applications that do the shuttling from place to place.  I’d love to have one place to keep my stream – and decide what other streams should get any given update.  This would make me much more likely to participate actively, because I could protect my less-geeky friends from seeing updates about semantic web visualizations.  And honestly, it’ll be a long time before everyone I know is on G+ (if ever) so I do want to make sure my Farmville-addicted friends see my updates too.

I’d also love to see incoming integration.  For instance, Runkeeper integration would totally rock.  It already takes input from my FitBit, so everything’s in RunKeeper, so I could send those updates to my Fitness circle of people-who-actually-care-about-my-training.  My Runkeeper updates go to Facebook, but again, it’s kind of spammy.  I’m generally more ok with dumping everything to Facebook because the stream is so noisy to begin with, but I’d really rather target those messages to folks who have an interest in hearing about it.

So, G+, can we have some APIs soon?

Sharing this on G+ with Friends, APIs

Tagging here as Geek Stuff, Google +, API