I think Google needs to allow followers to subscribe to circles instead of relying on the publisher to do the sorting. E. Johnson puts it best in his blog post at http://www.thejohnsonblog.com/2011/07/16/google-circles-and-cognitive-dissonance/.

… I have nearly 9000 followers, most of whom added me out of an interest in photography. Meanwhile, I follow only 1600, because…. even 1600 is so many that my news feed “scrolls” too fast to keep up.

So how else to share with 9000 people what they came to see, than by sharing to public? (if I shared to my photography circle, 7400 of the followers would see nothing)

I suppose there is a bit of a disconnect even in my thinking above…

How do I know the reason they followed me? And how can I assign them to a circle-of-interest-to-them without knowing what their reason for following me was? (I’m pretty sure it’s photography, but what if it’s not? how do you know why people follow you? how do you properly classify your followers so that they only see what interests them?)

Now if Google some choices on their subscription model, so that the follow-er had a choice in what he subscribed to, that would make things better. Like maybe I, as a follower, could choose to follow posts with pictures in them, or maybe I could put keywords as a criteria to the posts that I follow on certain people, while subscribing to full feeds on others?

Facebook is has a more mature (in my opinion) subscription model. I can add a person as a friend, or simply subscribe to their feed. Even as a friend, the subscription model offers the choice to subscribe to: All updates, Most updates, Only important. Then in types of updates: Life events, status updates, Photos, Games, Comments and Likes, Music and Videos or Other Activity.

So this puts control in the hands of the person consuming the content rather than in the hands of the person posting it. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Thank you for your review!