I agree, circles mandate additional cognitive load. They should've been implemented such that each user had 2-3 circles max, like "Work", "Friends", and "Family", and it was almost always invisible (meaning you'd almost always share with all). Prompting the user each time they want to post something and making them choose from their 8-10 circles greatly increases the friction of posting.
That, and the decision is one-sided. Say I want to post something publicly about some new technology. Do I post it publicly and have it go into my family's feeds where it will be considered akin to spam? What if one of my friends actually _is_ interested in new tech but I don't know it?
I get that it would be an added layer of indirection, but to allow each user to have multiple subject personas for posting and let others subscribe to said personas might have been more useful. As it stands, I err on the side of caution and post privately to the people I can best guess might be interested.
I think it would work better one-way if you could separate "visible to" and "posted to". I would like to post to "public" and "techy people", which would mean it appears in the feeds of people I don't have in my circles who have me in theirs, and people I have in my tech circle. It would like it to still be visible to people in my other circles if they went looking for it, but it wouldn't appear in their feeds.
I have the same issue. Most of my g+ usage was photos that I shared with family only. I also shared the odd tech post publicly. When I do that my family get weird 'you might have missed' spammy emails, which I have been questioned about several times. I.e. why are you sending me this 'crap' stuff I'm really not interested in.
I personally use them a lot. For example, I share immediate family-related photos and posts with the Family circle, general family stuff with the Extended Family, some stuff with Friends, some with Colleagues. It's useful and powerful feature, but requires skills similar to the email Inbox organization which some people seem to find too hard.
It's not that it's too hard, it's just not something I want to worry about. I think some people like to really organize things and some see it as a hassle.
For myself my inbox has essentially two folders. Inbox and Archived. My facebook lists is just friends and my google plus circles is just whatever the default is.
I don't want to think about who I'm sharing things with. I either share it with everyone on a social network or send it as an email to specific people.
Personally I never saw what the big deal was. They allow you to put people into lists, which you could already do on Facebook and Twitter at the time. But because they called them "circles" and visualised them as such, suddenly it was a radical new idea or something.
I think this is the crux of why G+ failed. When I first started using it, circles seemed like a killer feature. I divided all my contacts into work, friends, family, by location, etc. So I could share programming stuff with tech friends, but local stuff with local friends.
But, instead, I find I just share everything I care to share public. I think what people share is part of how they present themselves, and if I'm always in the context of being myself, with my real name and the same picture, then I'm going to share the same set of stuff.
