I met him through church and at work. Maybe we have some other mutual interests.

How do I know Joe?

Coincidentally also through church and work, but we're both programmers (Jack is an engineer with different technical interests), we play soccer together, we enjoy seeing movies in the theater, and we participate in team trivia at restaurants and bars together.

By tagging people (or placing them into circles in the G+ sense), I can select which group to communicate something to based on selecting a tag or set of tags. "Hey soccer peeps, I'm going to take my ball and some cones down to the field at Central Elementary this Saturday if you want to come out and practice with me." directed @soccer_peeps.

Maybe throw a few groups together that aren't fully overlapping in general: @soccer_peeps @trivia_teamsters "Party at my place this Saturday, here's a link to RSVP and sign up to bring something."

I'm not forced to put everyone into a distinct category or circle, but can use loose taggings effectively.

Option 1 is for content that won't offend anyone or tarnish the author's reputation. The audience can include all contacts including coworkers, family, etc. and the author will often use their real name. Example: Facebook.

Option 2 is for risqué content. It could cause issues with employment and other real-life relations. The audience must be carefully controlled, or if not, a pseudonym (that only a carefully controlled audience, if anyone at all, can map to a real name) must be used. Example: Reddit; private group chats.

This seems to cover most scenarios without the overhead/stress of trying to shoehorn all of these boundaries in a single platform/app.

Option 3 is for very personal stuff that you don't want to make public. Many of us put photos of our small children in this category. On a more depressing note, this could also include things like grief that a small group experiences over serious illness or death in the family. Not everything non-public is necessarily risque.

(FWIW I'm working on something in this space. Hoping to have something to share within another month or two...)

Separate icons on ones launcher go a long way toward maintaining intent.

You setup your circles for various topics.

Neat idea. Complete failure.

I’ve set up social interactions for major companies. Basically any restriction on who can see what will kill the feature.

I think that's likely true for social media apps where the product is "free" in that users are the product and advertisers are the customers that fund it. In that business model, your number one goal is to maximize eyeballs.

But Haven doesn't have that business model at all, so it's not clear to me that a way to control who sees what posts would harm success.

By analogy, farmers want to grow as many plants per acre as they possibly can to maximize revenue. The idea of potting their plants individually makes no sense. But if I just want a plant on my windowsill and don't want dirt everywhere, a pot is what I want.

Any talk of tech people and farmers seems to always change to pot.

Probably the big risk for this thing is that nobody wants to keep track of separate websites for dozens of individuals, most of whom only post something they can see once a week at most. You need to aggregate all of those updates from dozens of people you know into a single website and build a feed, then you have something that probably always has something the user might find interesting, and all in one place, so they'll actually check it regularly.

Instead, have a system where you can categorize your posts and other people can explicitly opt-in or opt-out to following particular categories.

That way, you can do a series of detailed posts on Orson Welles (say) for interested parties without worrying about whether you’ll bore or scare off the rest of your friends.

That seriously pissed me off.

https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/doxxing-that-cau...

Who can see this:

    x  Family
    x  Friends
    0  Co-workers
    0  Quiddich team (custom group)

This is the same issue as group messaging in most instant message type systems (including SMS/MMS). It's forcing a full connection between all participants, when really we may only want a fan-out structure.

I haven't used it much (not as many people on it in my social circles) but WhatsApp's broadcast lists are like G+ circles in this regard.

You could use some combination of the two sets of controls to provide pretty granular privacy control over all sorts of things.