Here is how Google describes this feature: "Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your “Creepers” circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your “College Buddies” circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your “Family” circle to only ring your mobile phone."

Depending on how you use Google+, this is indeed a really useful new feature, especially given that Google makes it very easy to set rules and even different voicemail greetings for every different caller.

Sadly, No Circles Interface in Google Voice

It's worth noting that this doesn't mean you can now drag and drop your contacts into different circles, though. Instead, this feature is actually a bit hidden in the Google Voice contacts settings (click on Contacts, then select a group, then click on Edit Google Voice Settings.

Chances are, if you follow a lot of people on Google+, just a few of these are likely to ever call you. This feature, then, is probably more interesting for those who are either very meticulous about how they organize their Google+ circles and those who use it as a very personal social network and less like Twitter or Facebook.

Skype, which was recently acquired by Microsoft, already offered its users access to their Facebook news feeds in earlier versions, but this new version takes this integration a step further by also making Skype a Facebook IM client and giving its users access to their Facebook contacts database. As GigaOM’s Kevin C. Tofel points out, “Facebook continues to become the de facto contact database for many,” so this integration makes keeping your Skype contacts up to date a lot easier.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft has always had a cozy relationship with Facebook (including an early investment in the service and subsequent integration into Bing and other services). Adding more Facebook services to what has now become a Microsoft product also makes sense in this context, especially given that Google and Facebook have never quite seen eye to eye.

For quite a while now, Skype has been offering Skype to Go as an easy and cheap way to make calls from any phone to your friends, family members and business contacts abroad, but the system wasn’t very flexible (you only got one dial in number) and not necessarily the easiest to use (you had to wade through quite a few voice prompts before you could make your call).

Now, with the new and enhanced Skype to Go, you can now set up a maximum of 9 local direct dial numbers that you can save in your contacts list and that automatically route your calls to your contacts abroad. Skype basically converts your international numbers into local ones.

The great thing about this new feature is that it works from any phone, on any network and doesn’t even eat into your data plans.

If you regularly call your brother in Spain, for example, Skype will give you a local number in the U.S. for him that you can save in your contacts list and whenever you feel like chatting with him, you just dial the local number, type in your pin and Skype will automatically route this call to his number in Spain. You pay Skype’s low international rates for these calls, as well as whatever your landline or mobile phone company charges you for local calls.

To set this up, you sign in to Skype on its website, tell Skype which number to call and it will generate a local number for you (you can choose area codes etc. yourself). Then, you save this local number in your contacts and you’re done.