Facebook: 181 ‘friends’
Twitter: 144 followers, following 80
Google+: 6 people in circles
I’m a bit selective with adding friends on Facebook as I like to keep the signal:noise ratio sensible.  Likewise with Twitter, although I may follow people but never actually see anything of theirs unless they are in a list. Even so, I think you need to get over about 100 to really start to make use of it all.

At the moment Google+ is like buying my first CD player.  It is the new toy alongside the turntable and cassette deck but I have several cases of cassettes,  2 metres of LPs on a shelf, and only a single CD.  I want to play with the new toy, but there are only so many times you can listen to Supertramp’s greatest hits.  (Yes – that was my first CD)

I am liking the concept of G+ though.  On Facebook I have filtered a lot of the dross like updates on games people are playing, daily horoscopes, quizzes and any other app I can block.  Unfortunately I tend to view the stream in Tweetdeck and not the Facebook website, and that ignores all the ignores and hides on FB.   I reckon that I could do something similar on G+ by putting people I want to be in contact with but don’t want to see their every frequent thought into a separate circle and just not look at that circle’s stream.  Nice.

The Google+ circles are a bit like the lists on Twitter, but I like the fact that people don’t know what circle they are in, whereas on Twitter if I put people in a list called “twats” they can see that.

Best of all is being able to select who you share something with.  On Twitter everything is shared with the world, even with people who are not on Twitter.  On Facebook you can make your updates only visible to friends but you can’t be selective amongst those friends.   You might have a wonderful filthy joke to share which you know a lot of friends would appreciate but which you wouldn’t want your granny to see.

One problem with Facebook has always been the way everybody is classed as a friend.  It might be that you want to keep in touch with or be able to share information with people who you would never class as anything like a friend.  For example, Facebook keeps recommending Alan Quirk as a friend.  It may be that there is some local matter I would want to talk to him about but having him show up as a friend would be a high price to pay.

So far, so good.  I just hope they don’t go and spoil it by having the equivalent of bloody Farmville on Google+    I would much rather see links to Twitter and Facebook (there is already a Firefox and Chrome add-on for that, but it is quite rudimentary), a Blackberry app, or a WordPress plugin.  Links in Tweetdeck would be nice too, but I think that is a lot less likely now it is owned by Twitter.