I love Google+. I started using it this morning, and it is, for a lack of a better word, awesome. Though it takes many concepts from Facebook‘s playbook, they’ve definitely solved one of the biggest issues of Facebook – friends lists and filtering.
Google+ integrated a simple mechanism called Circles: each contact can be assigned to one or more groups such as friends, family, and Acquaintances. It is also possible to create new circles (such as work buddies etc).
By assigning friends to circles, stream filtering and selective sharing becomes an extremely simple task. Now I can share pictures of my newborn daughter only with my family or see posts only from my real and close friends. Pretty cool. Let’s hope they won’t over complicate things here. They will face a major challenge when they will grow – the more friends one have, the more complex it would be to manage these circles. But it is definitely the right way to go.

My friend Jon Burg also wrote an insightful post about the invitation mechanism Google used for Google+

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