I have the same problem, too much spam, but about this solution having a huge potential... I feel like a lot of people feed on that "spam", i.e. gossip, to fill their lives, and make them more interesting. I think that's one reason why facebook is so popular and people spend so much time on it - there's always something happening, relevant/important or not.

Besides, FB has been offering features like this for a long time already, all the people that I know that actually care about privacy have neat friend lists and post only for specific groups of people, have limited profiles/walls, etc.

You can create friend lists on Facebook. I don't use them (I just hide people who spam) but they seem to do what you want..

Friends list on facebook are painful things to use, edit and apply to various posts. Each action tends to be multi screen bonanza and are never ever on by default, and things can still slip through. If facebook would clean up their groups functionality (which I doubt since it goes against their goals) then it would be a better competitor to google +

pretty much only thing you can do with lists on Facebook is assign people to lists.

The feature exists but it's inadequate for properly filtering content.

The problem with this is going to be convincing all those people you care about to join Google+, and/or posting their interesting content there instead of on Facebook.

On Facebook, why don't you just hide the people you're not interested in?

Thats not how its works. For me the problem is the content, not the people behind it.

But if their content is all being funneled off to a "spam/noise" area, are you ever going to actually check that area? If not, they're effectively hidden.

From the demo you have to choose one and only one circle for each person. To me this is a huge problem. A lot of people hang out with some coworkers off-hours and they should be able to put these people into more than 1 bucket.

This is only a limitation in the demo. In the actual product, you can place friends in multiple cirlces.

I'm hoping this is just a limitation of the demo.

I think so. Check this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnv1Mbj1jKw&feature=relmf... They pull the same people into different circles. (People don't fade out)