File-a-Friend: For All Your Friend-Filing Needs

OH MY GOD HOW HARD DO I LOVE GOOGLE+ RIGHT NOW?!?! Let me count the ways...

Just kidding, there's only one: Filing human beings is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Or with just your shirt off. Seriously, I had no idea that I wanted to do this with the various people in my life, but it turns out I very much DID want to do this. On Facebook, it's difficult to file people. It can be done, but it's time-consuming. And then, when I want to say something, I can either share it with everyone I've ever met, or spend an absurd amount of time deciding who gets to see what.

The root of the problem is - and you may have gathered this by now - I'm a human being. And as such, I have a variety of friends, interests, and even emotions! Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I feel happy. Sometimes I feel drunk. Sometimes I feel...nope, that pretty much covers it. When I feel sad, I want to share with friends who will be gentle and sympathetic. As below:

When I feel happy, I want to share with friends who will be happy with me and say nice things. As below:

When I feel drunk, I want to share with friends on whom I have so much dirt that I don't have to worry about them EVER telling anyone about that thing I said while drunk, as I would be mortified. As below:

But what usually happens is more like this: I feel sad and want to share with gentle/sympathetic people. Being too lazy to go through all 200 (rough estimate) of my friends and identify those people, I post to everyone and assume humanity will sort itself out. And I am gravely mistaken, as below:

I feel happy and want to share with happy/nice people. Being too lazy to go through all 3,000 (rough estimate) of my friends and identify those people, I post to everyone and assume humanity will sort itself out. And I am gravely mistaken, as below:

I feel drunk and want to share with people on my Mutual Assured Destruction List so I know it won't come back to haunt me. Being too drunk to go through both of my friends and identify the one who won't rat me out, I post to everyone and assume humanity will sort itself out. And I am gravely mistaken, as below:

So this never goes well for me. Ever. The alternative, as mentioned above, is to hand-pick which friends get to read a particular bit of news. This process is painful and annoying and, most importantly, I don't trust Facebook to work right half the time, so there isn't much point. The option I go with most of the time is just keeping my trap shut altogether. That's fine as far as it goes, but surely it defeats the purpose of social networking when I can't say ANYTHING without fear of attracting all the wrong attention?

Also, if I keep writing blog posts like this one, I won't have any FB friends left. And then I'll have to move permanently to Google+.

But that will be fine because Google+ has completely circumvented this problem by creating "Circles"! Circles are genius, and their creation method is even better. Google gives you a page with little pictures of all your friends (sorry - no good way to screenshot that without outing my friends, and I'd like to keep some of them), and then it gives you little circles to drop them into! You can put the same friend in multiple Circles if you want, they never find out the names of the Circles you've put them in (my previous experience with FB is that it does show the names of your little friend groupings), and then you can choose which Circles get which news! Brilliant! Tell your Yoga class about clearing your throat chakra WITHOUT inviting the mockery of some drunk asshole you knew in high school! Show your family a thousand cute pics of your cat without having your new boyfriend find out that you dress Mr. Biggles up like an old-timey barber! Circles = privacy, and it's about time we got a little more of that!

Circles also give you (er, me) a maniacal feeling of power. I can already tell that my current Circles, politely named "Friends", "Acquaintances", "Family", "Improv", etc. will soon be replaced or joined by Circles with names like "Jerks with whom I'm obligated to socialize", "Evil Incarnate", "Stalkers", and "Barnacles". And then I will lose hours and hours of my life in the practice of avenging real or perceived wrongs by moving people from Circle to Circle. Like: "Yeah, you WERE my friend! But a gift card to Bass Pro Shops? For my birthday? Welcome to the Barnacles Circle, jerkface." Even now I only know 12 people on Google+, and I am already far too enamored of staring at their little faces, pondering which file fits each one best.

It's a sickness. I hope I never get well. I'll see you all on Google+...but I'll never tell you which Circle you're in. MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Post-Posting Final Thought: Why is it that Google is so good at recognizing my need to keep certain people out of certain Circles, but they STILL don't understand that the "Consider Including" crap in Gmail is literally the stoooooooopidest thing since snack packs of Oreos?