Google+ to absorb social sharing startup Frid.ge

Fridge, a Y Combinator-funded startup that concentrated on small, private groups for social content sharing, has been acquired by Google with the intention of folding its team and product into Google+.

Fridge worked on a pretty simple concept: create intimate, private user groups to share photos, links, and status updates. Think Facebook, but limited to your "real friends." Users would create a group, invite other users by email, share their content about a particular event or subject in facebook-style feed, and close it up when the talking and sharing is done.

On Thursday, the site announced it is "closing up shop" to become part of Google+. Current users will no longer be able to post new content, but anything they've posted up until today can be downloaded and saved. While you will no longer be able to post anything new to Fridge, you will still be able to download and save your data. On Saturday August 20, 2011 at 6pm ET, all user data will be deleted.

If you are now, or were ever a Fridge user, you can download all your media by hitting "Export Group data" for each Group you want to save.

It is currently unknown how Fridge will be incorporated into Google+, but the startup offers several features, such as group text messaging, group event coordination and polls, and group privacy/visibility controls, which could all be beneficial to Google's still fresh peer organization tool known as Circles.