1. An electronic social networking system comprising: one or more computing devices; and one or more computer-readable media coupled to the one or more computing devices and having instructions stored thereon which, when executed by the one or more computing devices, cause the one or more computing devices to perform operations comprising: transmitting contact data for displaying graphical representations of people profiles for display to a user, the people profiles being contacts of a user profile of the user within a computer-implemented social networking service; generating a first social circle of the user profile, the first social circle comprising a first subset of people profiles of the user profile within the social networking service and defining a first distribution for a digital content item of the user profile, wherein the digital content item includes information that identifies the user profile to the contacts of the user; generating a second social circle of the user profile, the second social circle comprising a second subset of people profiles of the user profile within the social networking service and defining a second distribution for the digital content item; processing the first social circle to provide a first access control list that specifies which of the first subset of people profiles are granted access to the digital content item; processing the second social circle to provide a second access control list that specifies which of the second subset of people profiles are granted access to the digital content item; and in response to user input, providing the first social circle and the second social circle for selection by the user to define a distribution of the digital content item from the user profile, the distribution comprising at least one of the first distribution based on the first access control list and the second distribution based on the second access control list, wherein the digital content item is distributed from the user profile to each people profile of the first subset of people profiles based on the first access control list and the digital content item is distributed from the user profile to each people profile of the second subset of people profiles based on the second access control list.