July 8, 2011
Google+ is all about building your social graph of friends and acquaintances. The biggest separating factor on the platform versus other platforms who have later followed suit, is the ability to group your friends, family, colleagues, into separate “circles”, allowing you to very easily share posts and photos with certain groups of people.
On Twitter, I used to ‘like’ things that I wanted to read later, and would call up my page of liked activities as a list of bookmarks. I’ve since given up that practice and use Twitter ‘likes’ for their intended purpose, but what to do about bookmarking things I wanted to read later? Or start working on drafts of posts without publishing them for the world to see yet?
On Google+ I created a “Read Later” circle which have a single person in the group: me.
When I want to bookmark another post to read later, I share it only with my “Read Later” circle. Then when I have some time, I open all posts for that circle, read through the saved posts, and decide whether to delete the post from my circle or not.
If inspiration struck and I wanted to start writing some content, I would also share that writing with just my “Read Later” circle so only I could find it. Later I can “Edit post” and continue my writing, and when it’s complete I can copy and paste that article into a new post and select which groups should see my post.