Content Circles leverages many of the qualities that are popular in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Invitations, micro-blogging, chatting, content posting, tagging, and email notifications provide the key ingredients for online collaboration.
However, unlike these social networking sites, the goal of Content Circles is not to establish a large group of friends and openly follow each other's activities. Rather, the focus is on specific project collaboration with a restricted set of participants.
For example, Content Circles makes it easy to establish new workgroup circles for each of your projects. Just invite the members you want to each circle and they will receive an invitation to join. If they already have Content Circles, they can accept the invitation in the client and immediately receive the circle. If they are new to Content Circles, they'll receive your invitation message and instructions for how they can download, install, and get started.
This two-phase invite/accept for members to join a circle ensures both parties have accepted the responsibilities of membership and have established trust. This is similar to Facebook friends but unlike the one-way follow in Twitter. And unlike both Facebook and Twitter, these circles are private so only the members of the circle have access to the content, comments, and activity tracking for the circle. Finally, instead of everyone having open access, the rights for each circle member are restricted based on the role assigned by the circle owner.
By applying the key qualities of social networking with the controls of content management, Content Circles provides the best platform for team collaboration.
