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Google+: Circles are sets

Tim Bray of Google, about Google+:

Circles are, mathematically speaking, sets, and I think set arithmetic would come in real handy: “Post this to the intersection of my Photogeeks circle and my Vancouver circle”. I can think of lots of other amusing permutations. The reason I bring this up is because I smile, envisioning a future in which math teachers use social-network constructs to explain Set Theory.

If nothing else, I’d like a tool that’d display intersections and identify subset relationships among my circles. Just for my amusement. How many intersections are null sets, how many have just one member; to be surprised by who the people are in intersections; how close the memberships of two circles are…

4 replies on “Google+: Circles are sets”

Dude, I just signed into google +, was playing around with circles, and this is the first thought that struck me! Then I come across this. Epic. Calls for a Jim Beam :D

Heh. Creating circles seems like too much work for me. But many dozens of
people have me in their circles so clearly I’m the lazy one. Or I have a
warped sense of social networks.

They just have you in their universal set. That’s not hard work at all :P

Most people are in most people’s universal set, then. That’s Facebook.

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