Can you guess why these lovely renditions caught my eye? Yup. Bridges.

If you’re in the Pearl, do put Oblation on your list of places in which to browse. Truly, it’ll turn your heart around—especially when it’s raining.

I got roped in a few days ago because I so NEED another learning curve, not to mention another social media tool, and, oh yeah, something new to suck the sand from my personal hourglass. In my first 20 minutes messing around with it, I discovered the big FB differentiator. It’s all about the circles. Circles are so Google, are they not? In the Google circle game, you put your connections into categories: friends, family, colleagues, etc. You can put people in more than one if you like, or move them around. The deal is, what you post is circle-specific.Think of Google+ as Facebook with a sort of Eddie Haskel bent.  Gone is the conundrum of Aunt Loraine being privy to the fact that you stayed up too late drinking tequila the night before. Likewise, your colleagues at work don’t need to know that your son scored three goals in his last soccer match. Need a new dentist, but don’t want to offend her cousin, who happens to be in your “neighbors and friends” circle? Invite to the smart folk in your “adviser” circle to opine.

Living as many simultaneous lives as I do, I sort of appreciated that right off. But then, because I’ve spilled a bean or two in my life, I see the false security in such a system. For instance, let’s say you work for company A, and you invite your boss and your colleagues into your “work” circle. Let’s say then, that Company A downsizes and you get the pink slip. Two weeks later you get scooped up by Company B, the competition! What do you do with your work circle then? Erase and start anew?

Or, let’s say that you are in a book group, and you create a Book Group circle. Let’s say you read a book by a local author, and everyone in your book group hates the book and your circle is full of disparaging remarks. Let’s say that one of the remarks gets reposted in the “family” circle of one of the groups, where a friend of the author lurks. You see what I’m getting at? It’s viral! To think that what happens in a Google+ Circle stays in a Google+ Circle is borrowing trouble.

Clearly, all of this circle management is pretty time-consuming, not to mention that now, instead of one Facebook Wall, you need to check in with and monitor several walls. Oh, and then you’ll want to repost things onto all of those walls. It’s like throwing a dinner party every night, only you have six dining rooms and you have to race betwixt them in your hostess finery checking the temp of the soup. Seeing if someone needs cream for their coffee. My first day on Google+? I had a waitress dream. I kid you not: one of those “I can’t keep up” nightmares where undone stuff piles up around you while you slowly choke and gasp.

But, until it goes down in flames, I’m on the new hamster wheel. I’m very eager to see if Google can keep the circle unbroken. So far, they seem to be pretty forward-thinking, but with the exponential nature of dynamic in human relationships, well, it’s an ambitious venture. But hey, they’re Google. They can do anything, right?

For more information on the early Internet and how it all works, check out What The Heck Is The Internet

Peter Falk is now truly an angel among us.