New Images Suggest "Shared Circles" Coming Soon in Google+

Florian Rohrweck has been on a role lately uncovering upcoming features to Google+ (including noticing features in Google’s code hinting at Google+’s launch days before it launched and as other bloggers were under embargo and being demoed top secret versions), and it seems Google isn’t keeping their upcoming features well enough behind a test area somewhere. In a recent blog post (language), Rohrweck uncovered some new images hinting at the possibility of sharable Circles to others you want to share to in Google+. Such functionality would be comparable to Twitter Lists, which anyone can subscribe to.

Looking at the image names, each one starts with “shared_circle”, providing open, closed, and highlighted versions of each, and an icon representing the circles. It would seem that Google+ is readying a way to let you share certain circles of yours that anyone can subscribe to and view. This would completely replace just about every feature Twitter has of benefit (other than perhaps the 140 character limit and SMS interface if you call those benefits) – it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more Twitter users get Google+ accounts.

In addition to Shared Circles, Rohrweck seems to have also uncovered that Google has added some sort of Questions icons to its default set of Sprites for Google+, hinting that they are readying a Questions product for launch soon to compete with the likes of Facebook Questions and Quora. Also among Rohrweck’s finds were a Chess piece icon, which may be one of the games also rumored to come out soon.

If you’re looking for a great blog to get the dirt on what Google is preparing, be sure to check out Rohrweck’s blog here. It will be interesting to see, with more CSS, Javascript, and other source digging, what will be found as we move forward (and if Google finally decides to implement a testing area for these types of releases before the products go live). Great job Florian! You’re always welcome to do a guest post or two (or three) here. (Someone should offer Florian a job at Google, or maybe Facebook?)

As always, you can follow me on Google Plus at https://plus.google.com/107833107845497630206.