[donall]

I assumed the concept had come from Google's own research, which I first saw a year ago in this slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

According to Wikipedia, Diaspora was initially funded in April 2010 and a developer preview was released in September 2010. The Google slide deck was published in July 2010, so presumably this is an idea they had been kicking around for a while before then.

It seems that the notion of friend (circles|aspects) is just one of those obvious ideas that everybody had, but nobody executed properly until now.

[dspace]

This is exactly what I was thinking, since I saw that presentation last year. It could be that the Diaspora guys were inspired by the Google research, and not the other way around. It just took Google longer to push it out to a product.

[apinstein]

I agree. I saw the Google+ circles and immediately thought of that preso. Makes me very excited to try Google+, too bad I can't get in!