Google+ The Social MacroNetwork

Google+ has found its place in the social network ecosystem: Twitter is the interest network, Facebook is the social network, Path is the micronetwork, and now Google+ is the macronetwork. With the new Circles volume slider, you categorize people and then adjust the presence of those entire sets of people in your main stream. This lets you efficiently consume updates from across relationship types in whatever balance you choose through a single feed. No other service offers this way to maximize content stream relevancy.

Without the Circles volume slider, the macronetwork model didn’t work. Managing relationships individually was tedious at that scale, and Google didn’t know which Circles you wanted to see most of. This allowed noisy acquaintances or public figures to drown out quieter close friends, making it difficult to consume their content in the same stream.

source http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/circles-volume-slider/