You're absolutely right, and google+ does give you the opportunity to do that. My circles are created based on interests. I have one for friends interested in politics, one for people who share my taste in music, etc etc. I only enjoy using facebook to share information with others and have them share information with me. If I can redirect my link to a specific set with out having to "spam" the rest of my friends with 20 links about a topic I know they're uninterested in, I would much rather do that. Alternatively, I tire of acquaintance B shooting out status updates about fly fishing when I have the opposite of interest in that. I hope they place me in an appropriate circle and leave those updates for the fly fishing one. Google+ does understand its about sharing information, but just throwing information out into the internet abyss is pointless if it's not relevant to the audience.
I agree with that. And after using Google+ for a bit, I'm still not quite sure if they got that right. It makes me wonder if FB isn't successful because it enables communication, but because it enables vanity and voyeurism.
This shouldn't happen. You only get messages from people that you put in your circles. This makes the point that Google might need to better explain how Circles works, however. The mistake of the FP and Google+ approach is trying to tag a person as a category, when these sites are about sharing different types of information and topics, regardless of the relationship you have with them. That's an interesting point. Maybe it's not so much that we want to categorize people, but we want to categorize our communication? -On that note, stick around. Hubski is going to roll out an update in a couple of days that is going to mix things up a bit in that regard. :)