I agree. The use of circles is currently a reaction to the noise on facebook and twitter. And whilst that is a social reaction (too much noise > too little no

I agree. The use of circles is currently a reaction to the noise on facebook and twitter. And whilst that is a social reaction (too much noise > too little noise), it needs a technical solution. I just feel that circles aren't quite it. There's some little thing missing in finding the sweet spot. The only things that come to mind would be to create topic circles and then place people circles within them. The circles placed within a topic would be arranged in rings, those closest to the epicentre get fully sharing (with whatever notifications, etc), and those on the periphery would get some lesser shared view (no notifications, not on main stream wall), and any circles not included wouldn't see anything. But that's probably way too complex to explain to 150 million users.