When was the last time that you used the Circle sharing feature on Google+? Statistically, it's probably been a while... and you certainly haven't used it in the last few days. According to enthusiast site Google Plus Daily, the ability to share Circles of followed people and pages was quietly removed from Google's social network earlier this week. If you've never used Shared Circles, they were similar to public follow lists on Twitter.

Screenshot credit: Platform Pundit

Google hasn't given a reason for the change - indeed, the company didn't mention it at all - but it's a fair guess that reduced user engagement and abuse by a small amount of users led to the removal of the feature. Apparently as recently as last week, Shared Circles were mostly being used for low-level social spam that added a lot of useless content. If you're looking for something similar, the Google+ Collections tool allows you to see groups of related content (but not necessarily users) in your feed.

Source: Google Plus Daily