Creating New Circles

The longer you use Google+, the larger your Circles may become; at this point you start to come across the limitations of having just the default four circles.

If you work for a large organization, you might consider splitting up Acquaintances into smaller Circles. I have Circles for the Macworld team, the wider Editorial team I work with, and everybody in the world I work with.

To create a new Circle, drag a group of highlighted people to the empty gray Circle. Here are the specific steps:

1. Click multiple people in the Stream to select them.

2. Drag the selected people to the empty Circle that says Drop here to create a circle. The people are added to the new Circle. You can also add other contacts from other Circles to the new Circle once it is created.

3. Click Create Circle. This brings up an edit box, as shown in Figure 5-5.

4. Type a name for the Circle in the Circle name text box.

5. Add a description for the Circle by clicking the Click to add a description link. This brings up a new text box and allows you to type a description up to 350 characters long. (This step is optional.)

6. If you wish, continue adding people by clicking Add a new person. However, I think it’s better to use the Stream to place everyone in the Circle first.

7. Click Create circle with X people (where X is the number of selected people) to add the new Circle to the Stream. The new Circle appears at the end of the current list in the Stream.

It is possible to skip the first three steps in the preceding list and create a completely empty Circle by clicking Create circle in the empty gray Circle icon. This is useful if you want to create an empty Circle and populate it with people later.