Getting bored with facebook? You may want to look into Google's new social network "Google+." It offers a good balance of social sharing and privacy. But if you don't know how to use it, it may appear to just be a mess of circle and contacts. So here are a few tips to help you get started.

1)       Change your profile's field-sharing settings. Your Google Account has certain basic fields that it can share with anyone -- but you don't have to go along with maximum sharing. Open your Google Account Profile and privacy settings, click Edit visibility on profile, and then click the individual profile fields and determine how public you want to make them.

2)       Disable resharing. Google Plus may make it easy for you to segregate who you share your information with, but your connections have no such limitations, meaning that something you share with a select few can still spread like wildfire across your networks. Nevertheless, you can disable resharing of a certain post after posting it: Just click the arrow in the upper-right-hand corner of the post and then click Disable resharing.

3)       Check your Incoming feed. Unlike Facebook, Google Plus lets people share things with you even if you're not following them. Thus, you'll want to check your Incoming feed now and then to see whether you're missing out on anything interesting from someone you don't follow. Think of it as a spam folder that occasionally contains something interesting.

4)       Use the Your Circles option while sharing. Google Plus's Circles system is great for letting you use your Plus account to set barriers between the various groups of people you want to share things with. If most of what you share on Google Plus isn't especially privacy-sensitive, however, use the Your Circles sharing option to automatically share items with all of your circles and avoid the trouble of clicking each individual circle.