"Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?"

This is a pet peeve of mine, using extremely generic words to describe an important part of what you are working on. "Object Oriented Programming" got away with it, but that is aimed squarely at developers. I don't think you want words like "aspect" in front of actual users.

I've noticed this a lot in academic research, also. I lost track of how many different ways I saw the word "feature" overloaded in different fields.

I'm guessing they should have just called aspects "groups".

From what I can tell, they are just groups of users which you can publish particular content/updates to.

Would that be confusing to use that terminology since groups was recently a staple of facebook with a very different meaning?

Agreed. "Groups" or "Circles".

I think they are supposed to represent 'aspects' of your life.

maybe they're streams

double rainbows

When you make a new account you get "home" and "work" aspects, which you can add people to individually. That actually goes a long way to making it clear.

Perhaps friend lists

And perhaps the initial aspect names and all other strings should not be hard coded in English into the product. Yes, it is pre-alpha, but it will be a pain later to replace all strings with the #t helper and keywords.