Google has scooped up startup social site Fridge as one of its first Google+-related acquisition. Fridge is focused around separating your social content into specific groups, keeping your shared media in the right hands and out of the wrong ones — a similar function to Google+’s Circles feature. “The Fridge team shares our vision of bringing the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the Web, and we’re excited that they’ll be joining Google,” Google said in a statement.
While Circles have been one of the most lauded tools of Google+, bringing Fridge’s interactive and intuitive take on the grouping scheme could be just the thing to really launch the application. While Circles is incredibly useful and in principle a necessary privacy element for the social network, implementing it isn’t the smoothest process quite yet. Hopefully this is exactly what Fridge will cure. We’re fans of the game-like interface creating Circles has, where dropping a contact into the designated Circles gives you a color confirmation and +1 sign, but to fully utilize Circles you have to invest some serious time. Fridge has been a hit with users for how easily you can segment your digital social circles, and we have high hopes for how this technology will be implemented into Google+.
“We strongly believe in the group social experience and couldn’t think of a better place to realize our vision of bringing the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web as part of the Google+ Project,” Fridge says. The site is officially closing its doors August 20, when all user data will be terminated.
