On Thursday I mentioned the need for a grouping mechanism for members of our homeowners association to be able to email each other. Now let's turn our attention to social media.

I have been a Facebook user for many years. I have my Facebook friends organized into 2 groups.

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I use the Personal group for non-work-related posts.

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I use the Professional group for work-related posts.

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Actually the way this works is that when I post a work-related item, I hide that post from the Personal people. In other words, I don't bore my family with information about technologies they have no interest in. I used to do the other way, limiting the post to people on the Professional list, but a customer alerted me that this prevented her from sharing my post with her friends.

Recently I have been using Google+. Google+ comes with predefined Circles that are essentially the same thing as Facebook groups - albeit a more explicit integration into the user interface.

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So here is the quandary. How do I use the groups?

1. On the on hand, I could put each of my friends into one and only one group. When I post a message on Google+, I could identify the groups that should see the posting. Work-related posts would go to TBD. Non-work-related posts could go to TBD. This is what I have done so far.

2. On the other hand, I could place, my friends in more than one circle. For each posting I made, I would pick a circle to which it applies, and all would be well.