Google+ Circles Makes It Easy to Separate Your Friends from Your Family and Coworkers

Google has just unveiled the first stage of its social networking plans. Of course, Google is not calling it a social network, but it's probably going to have a tough time convincing everyone else not to.

Google+ is, in essence, Google evolved, the idea is to take everything Google does and make it better, by adding social components. It seems like a poor plan in theory, but it may actually work.

No social website can exist without a list of contacts, friends, followers or whatever it is you want to call them. Google calls them circles.

"From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software," Vic Gundotra, Google's head of social efforts, explained.

Google takes the word circles in the most literal sense, you really have to add you friends to circles to indicate that they're part of a group.

Google+ suggests people you may know, from your Gmail and Google contacts, and you can then add them to circles based on whether they're family, close friends, work buddies and so on.

"Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in 'friend' paper—and sharing really suffers," Google explained.

The circles then become a big part of everything you do with Google+, anything you share, conversations, updates and so on, will be limited to the circles you want.

The Google+ homepage, which aggregates all of your social behavior on Google and acts more like the Facebook news feed, also takes circles into account, they're the first thing displayed on the left sidebar and you can easily switch between them.

From what we've seen so far, Circles looks well designed and robust, but the feature will have to prove itself in the wild once Google starts inviting more people to join Google+.