Google+ Idea: Control your Circles with Orbits

I've been playing around with Google+ today, and after starting to follow some well-known people started to get bombarded with posts onto my main stream that weren't too interesting, and since Google+ orders posts in the same way as Buzz, popular posts keep popping to the top.

A couple of hours ago I commented on a post by Robert Scoble, where he called himself the 'Scoble Virus' and commented that people should put him in a circle called "noisy buttheads"

My comment was that perhaps there would be a way to easily give preferences to circles about how visible they should be on your main streams (posts, photos, etc.)

It'd be nice to be able to 'mute' specific circles from our main stream... A bit like putting people in a Twitter list without following them... we could still select the circle and see it's stream, but wouldn't get bombarded with stuff amongst our 'closer' friends and family... perhaps a way to 'distance' ourselves from certain circles, have an 'inner orbit' for our closest friends, and outer orbit(s) for others?

I had an image in my mind as soon as I wrote that comment, so I decided I'd sketch it up to see what people think of it.

The idea

The idea would be to create orbits of visibility preferences (what messages you see in your main streams and notifications). The theory would be that the further people get the less visible you would make them, so you'd put noisy people like Robert Scoble into a far away orbit and only 'visit' occasionally.

The circle would still be listed alongside the main streams, but the circle icon would show as greyed out on stream pages where they won't show up.

Sure, you could put these toggles directly on the circles page, but I think the page would get a bit too complex. By grouping circles into orbits you have a as much or as little granularity as you desire (just create an orbit for each circle if you wish). For users who use the feature for the first time, the first few orbits could have defaults of gradually-reducing visibility settings.

What do you think? Too elaborate? Would this take care of the 'Scoble Virus' well enough? Leave a comment here, or of course on Google+ with ideas and suggestions