This completely ignores the reality of how people use Facebook, as if one could partition every personal relationship in your life into two homogeneous groups "friends" and "not friends."
Yes, I know you can have friend lists on Facebook, but this feature clearly embraces its uniformity.
It's worth noting that G+ was intended to solve the fine-grained partitioning of people, and yet, no-one I know uses it regularly. It's FB for friends, LinkedIn for work contacts, for most people.
You missed the point. Your original comment was an oversimplification of how people interact, similar to the argument "If you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide."
The way people interact with other people can not be reduced to a finite set of values, such as "friend or not friend" or "family member, lover, friend, acquaintance, co-worker". In other words, this is not a Facebook vs. G+ dilemma.
The problem here is the fact that Facebook has, yet again, limited the way we interact with other people by imposing their own structure and rules: if you don't want a person to know you're paying attention to them, don't pay attention to them.
Your proposed solution of "don't add them as a friend" is even more restricted. Maybe it's your way of interacting with people, but I don't see how it's justified to try to impose it on everyone else.
No, this grouping is not the intent but the consequence. What you actually do on G+ is tagging people and viewing them by tag. After a while, the tag-cloud per person over several accounts is a very nice statistical description. Most will tag you as friend or colleague, others will put you in a partition where they group acquaintances by hobby or interest.
> It's worth noting that G+ was intended to solve the fine-grained partitioning of people, and yet, no-one I know uses it regularly.
So... you're arguing that people choose social networks based on more than the presence of a particular implementation of a single feature? Groundbreaking addition to your "all your friends are the same" theory.
I have plenty of people I want to share info with. I can't think of a single person where there aren't times where I want to respond to their message later. Girlfriend, best friends, parents. All of them might wonder why it took me a day or two to respond after reading a message. I know I get grumpy when I see someone has read an iMessage and not responded.
The logical conclusion then is that "the reality of how people use Facebook" is going to change.
Facebook (not for the first time) is attempting to shape users' behaviour.
I am curious what sort of thinking went behind this change.
This completely ignores the reality of how people use Facebook, as if one could partition every personal relationship in your life into two homogeneous groups "friends" and "not friends."
Yes, I know you can have friend lists on Facebook, but this feature clearly embraces its uniformity.