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Google+ users should be able to select their own content, rather than you doing it for them

I was thrilled today to see this article today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly.

The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well.

But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manage them all in one place, it's still far from ideal. To let other people know that I even have the other accounts, I have to retweet something every now and then or send out a promo tweet on one or the other. What would be great (and this is what the author of that article proposes for Plus) is to be able to have a single account, but to specify which subject it goes in, and when people follow me, they select which content areas of mine that they want to see. They're deciding for themselves, not me for them, which is guessing and exclusionary.

There's two things that the article misses that I think are crucial to making this work. 
  1. You'd have to be able to make certain content groups private (user has to get permission before seeing the content) and have the option to block people from seeing certain content groups.
  2. You should be encouraged (by the process) to have a low number of content groups. I think that you should be able to create content groups and call them whatever you want, but if someone hauls off and makes 20-30 content groups, it could be confusing for the people choosing to follow you. I would have no more than 4-5 groups. 
When you get down to it, it's making the basis of Google+ more like blogs than like Facebook. You're creating content and defining it and then people can see the parts of it that they want to, opting into and out of the types of things you write rather than into you as a whole. And that makes a hell of a lot more sense than the ridiculous "real life social networks" theory that Circles is based on. 
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