Why Google+ will succeed wildly. At first.

At some point, I will stop being surprised at how closely you mirror my thoughts about this sort of thing. This is the best analysis I've read yet about Google+.

Regarding granularity in outgoing posts, one should pay close attention to the categories you create, the Circles. Think about the divisions in your life and where they may overlap, create a circle that encompasses that overlap. Example: I have a problem with the Facebook and now default categories of "Friends" and "Family." I can definitely parse out my family. There are things I'd like to share with relatives, siblings, children. But "Friends" is a more amorphous category. I don't use it. I have friends I'd put in many different categories, not just one. So, I'm trying to spend some time thinking about the various categories in my life. (So much work, so little time.)

@Laura - thanks!

@Jeff - do you think it's worth all the time you'll invest to categorize everyone exactly right? Just to play devil's advocate, why not just post everything publicly *except* the occasional post you want to keep private (and for that use a single circle or, dare I utter the word, an email)?

I agree with your last statement: "To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want."

One way that G+ and circles do address the inbound messaging problem is by letting you select which circles' news feed you are viewing, which is actually a really useful concept: at one moment I might want to listen/read about what my family is posting, at another moment I want to see what techie friends are saying. However this might be a feature that an average user wont bother use...

good to hear another voice talking about why google+ is not really innovating - and to see it based on actual user research. some more ideas on what innovation could look like: http://sensemaya.org/2011/07/14/real-innovation-social-network-wars

You nailed it. Affording more control of distributing outbound posts is great for some, but allowing USERS (not the site) to control the messy torrent of inbound content is a MUCH more important and relevant to the majority of users.

I think the interesting-ness will come when/if Google+ starts building circles for you. Building them yourself is hard, but there's no reason that they couldn't look at the entire social graph and start to help you meet your goals through the analysis of your circles and how your friends built theirs.

The need for circles (missing in facebook) is not merely to limit the scope of outgoing posts. I want the capability to control the visibility of the responses to my posts. I ended up creating two separate facebook accounts. Google+ circles solves this problem.

I agree with Laura, this is the best analysis I have read about g+ as well :-)

I am apparently not the average user of facebook...I use it daily (multiple times a day) I read most post made by friends and update my status multiple times a week. I agree that I do want more people to read and like my posts, but there are times i would like to post something that I don't want all my in-laws to read, and other relatives, but i am not about to cherry pick through my hundreds of friend to exclude these people, instead I just don't post that comment, or post it and hope I am not making my grandmother cringe ;-) So while I would like more people to read and like my posts, I would prefer as well, that more of the "right" or appropriate people read my post.

I am loving my experience of g+ so far...just wish there were any easy way to get all my friends ported over to it :-S

Thanks for the great article!

This all seems very on target - but is missing one elephant in the room that I can see: network effects. Even if I prefer G+, I'm unlikely to switch to it if only a handful of my X hundred FB friends use it -- unless FB becomes a truly awful experience and I convince friends to defect en masse. To succeed, G+ must offer a technical solution to that problem (e.g. a possible solution: any time one of my existing FB friends joins G+, that person is automatically added to my G+ account, circles be damned).

I agree completely that the higher-level hurdle is managing inbound information (boy would I love to be able to turn off, using only one setting somewhere, anything generated by any FB game!) With that in mind, the following is critical, absolute must see viewing on the topic of managing inbound traffic:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Keep up the good work, Mark!

Mark: If the pain point is the overload of information it seems like G+ has helped ease it with streams of your circles, which you left out of your note.

@dack - in the interest of space I didn't want to post a full-fledged UI evaluation, but the "streams of circles" approach presents many of the same problems that FB does (even in FB's groups feature). for starters, if someone on G+ posts ten times in an hour, they jam the frequency - no way to turn down the signal (unless I de-circle them entirely), no way to survey the entire stream for other posters. then there are UI issues around setup and edit. Ideally it would be fun to dive into these tactics in a future post (in my copious spare time)...

maybe instead of worrying about the quantity of people who see content, people should be more worried about the quality of people seeing your content. By cutting down who sees what, they can reduce that overload of people viewing or rather, not viewing your content.

I do agree that a major painpoint for Facebook users is info overload. But I believe it is not that simple because people's interactions with Facebook are far from simple.

1) With Google+, you can use circles to decide what you read. This is not totally obvious, but easily done nevertheless.

1.5) There will always need to be a generic stream of everything by everyone. There's not a good reason to get rid of that feature. What could be included instead is an easier way to create a "home stream", or default stream.

2) What do you mean by "success"? Is it just number of users? How happy big-wig users like Xeni Jardin are? I don't see you linking to the goals that Google created for Google+, so how can you gauge its success?

3) "how many Facebook users wish that fewer people would read their posts?" How about asking how many Facebook users wish their mom, aunt, cousin, brother, etc. hadn't seen that last post? Or wish their unemployed friend would stop commenting on everything you post? Hardly anyone thinks of it while posting on Facebook, I think, because the option to change who sees it is not obvious. However, that choice is really obvious (though still clunky) in Google+. It makes you more conscious of what you say to whom. Just like (hopefully) in real life.

Google+ is far from perfect and of course it's still evolving. There will be backlash from both ends.

I'm sure Google+ is good, but it doesn't take into account what Facebook does : everyones wishes to be published, to be heard, to be considered.

Google+ says : 'sharing reinvented' - but people just don't want to share, they want to be heard !! That's Facebook's USP : the expression is important, not the sharing, it's a profoundly different concept...

I'm not a defender of Google, nor Facebook, but Facebook's GoodExperience is not about experience (which is by definition a NON-action) but about 'action', about 'BEING someone' - What is the best 'Good Experience you can give to someone ? It's easy : "BEING SOMEONE". I don't think Google is giving or promising that...

In the presentation by Paul Adams, one of the inventors of circles, http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2, "Real Life Social Network", he presents the use case of a school teacher not wanting to share her pictures of her visit to a gay bar with her students.

It's a pretty compelling case, but as you point out not one that touches the average user sharing average stuff with their average "friends".

You may want to take a look at Edd Dumbill's post, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/google-plus-social-backbone.html, "Google+ is the social Backbone", where he makes a strong case why this is not just about Google vs Facebook.

According to Edd, Google is looking to create the Social Backbone, thereby making the Social Layer a commodity and enabling developers to embed a social layer in their applications. It sounds very exciting to me as a developer.

Give the article a read and let me know what you think.

As much as I like the Circle interface, I have had a really hard time figuring out how I'm going to group people. I also don't like the idea of having to stop and think about which groups I want to send info to - it's just one extra step that actually has prevented me from actively using G+. I'm okay sending out a status update on FB for all to see, even if it's not relevant to everyone. And for those times I want to send a more private message to key people, I'll just send an email.

@nirali - EXACTLY. thanks.

Mark - Will circles cause a reduction in information overload due to posters applying greater selectivity in who sees what posts? I agree with your premise that most users don't complain about access control on Facebook, but I wonder if the circles will create a less overwhelming environment in Google Plus through second-order effects. In other words, rather than addressing overload by being "smart" on the receiving end in the style of Facebook's Top News function, Google has created a different interaction on the posting side that may lead to more effective, preemptive winnowing by the poster, rather than by an algorithm.

@Jesse - good question. It may very well turn out that way, but I haven't experienced any lack of overload in my G+ explorations. YMMV.

I like your skepticism. It mainly seems to be captured in this paragraph:
“For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently, here’s the main pain point I see mentioned: how do I get more people to read my stuff? How do I get more people to “Like” my project, my post, my group? More followers, more buzz, more influence, more more more publishing reach. Google’s response: here’s an interface to let you post to fewer people.”
I think you have that wrong, at least when I extrapolate from myself.
1) “How do I get more people to read my stuff?” Why not try … WordPress, Twitter or … a web site, as in plain old Web 1.0? Wasn’t that supposed to be the idea?
2) “For that minority of Facebook users who are posting frequently….” I’m in the majority of FB users who do NOT post frequently, but that it because I do want to post to fewer people, in a more intimate way. (After all, for my public posts I have WordPress, right here).
3) “Google’s response: here’s an interface to let you post to fewer people.” Actually, no. It’s: “here’s an interface that let’s you post to fewer OR more OR all people.” So my wife and I can communicate, my wife my parents and I, my wife my parents and my friends and I, and …. everybody.
What do I know? I’ve been on G+ for a couple of days. But it’s a new trajectory.

I'm a heavy user of Twitter, and a grudging user of Facebook. Both applications have harder to use grouping features. But you've nailed it about the 'stream.'

So here's my question. Can I 'twitterify' the steam... only see the first 200 characters of any post. Then throttle the 'over-sharers'? What we need is more and more controls because what we have is too clumsy... but this seems like a downward spiral.

When I REALLY want to communicate I go back to email.

I agree as well. I'm a bit surprised, since I have google friends populating from Gmail, where Facebook friends have come more organically from lots of sources. I have yet to figure out the 'public' version of Google+, such as how to follow Jeff Zeldman.
In terms of HCI, I have always said its much easier to parse from a long list of things you don't want rather than tell me what you do want. A life spent trolling record bins hones these sorts of skills, but I think they are innate. You can overload people with noise, but being able to select who you want messages to go to seems like a step backward, no matter how nice the interface.

This is an incredibly well-articulated post, and you're right on.

I think that, as Fred Wilson suggests, this service will work for an older demographic. My parents dont game FB for more comments. I think they'll genuinely enjoy sharing pictures of their grandkids only to family and close friends.

This service is not for the group that has already abandoned their privacy. Granted, Google has more information than Facebook on all of us, but it's not as overt and people trust it.

Regarding "Would you conclude that the urgent pain point in the Facebook experience is not being able to publish to a subset of your contacts? I doubt it. At least we've never found that, when Creative Good has done user research in social media. "
I would venture to guess that this is something that would never come up in any listening lab, usability test, or ethnographic research. Why? Because when this kind of stuff happens, we humans tend to bury it--fix it as best they can, as fast as they can; then forget about it as much as they can. None of us has likely witnessed these types of events (wanting to post to less people) happing with others, but every few days I read about or hear a friend tell me about how their life was almost ruined because they posted something that someone found offensive / shocking / not right. Some get fired, some lose close friends, some repair relations with some apologies. But in all cases, they could have prevented this with the limited posting / circles concept. So always be sure to watch the selection bias, the Heisenberg effect, and the innate desire for humans to want people to like them.

I agree that the UI and experience of the circles is top notch. And that G+ is not really breaking new ground when compared to Facebook. But I see G+ as just a stepping stone to amazing things. They have set a decent foundation to build on, whereas Facebook seems to have locked itself into limited ways (some of which is subconsciously greed driven, like the intentionally hard-to-use privacy settings). Don't get me wrong, I don't trust Google any more than I trust Facebook, but someone has got to take a stand against normal corporate greed. I just didn't think it would be Google until I saw G+.

@Alex - Good call on that TED talk--so true and explicit about what is going on.

I'm personally a fan of G+ at the moment and it's two of my conflicting personality traits; a tendency to be an introvert, and an insatiable curiousity, that lead Facebook to be a draining and time-consuming experience that G+ solves.
In all honesty, I don't care enough about what's happening in the life of friends of mine from primary school, but the knowledge that we're still somewhat connected is a comfort in itself.
With Circles, as posters have previously mentioned, the greatest benefit to me comes with the ability to filter the INCOMING posts. I'll often post publicly, and I am glad to get the odd comment from someone I may have forgotten, but the ability to filter the incoming messages is a massive life/time-saver.
Furthermore, it may sound sentimental, but I appreciate the lack of the 'Facebook Wall', because I'm sick of people starting a personal conversation with me in such a public forum. I would much prefer getting an email!

I think that basically, G+ is a win, not for the techies, but for the introverts.

What about a default circle "The World" that shares publicly with the open internet & all of your circles?

- Keeps control for the ones that need it and makes it easy for exhibitionists to live-out-loud
- Gives Google permission to use these posts, pluses etc. in search results or targeting ads
- Makes it clear to everyone what is public vs. what is private data

Main difference for me between Google+ & Facebook is that Google already captures so much of my digital stream that “fine tuning” it so they can target better ads seems reasonable to me (after all they are an advertising company).

Facebook on the other hand has no clear business model or explanation of what they will or won’t do with your social data in their “small” part of the net. That coupled with the “privacy is dead” concept is just creepy...

What happens in the Circle stays in the Circle!

Mark, I like the way you think and what you write.

You end with: "... To really out-innovate Facebook, Google will have to consider what average users want...Until that happens, average users will enjoy Google+ just fine as they stream, then flood, onto the service. They'll just find, once they get there, that it all feels oddly familiar."

Maybe that is what they want to offer: a familiar experience. I do not think that Google+ wants to out-innovate Facebook; at least not now. Maybe they just want to offer an alternative to Facebook; something that does the same thing but in a slightly different way and looks differently but feels very familiar. I guess, their goal is to gather the crowds - more people means more revenues. They did not manage to do it with Waves and Buzz, now they have a chance.

One point about reading and sending. I am bilingual. I have friends who do not understand English and I have friends who do not understand Bulgarian, and I have friends who read both. I need an interface that will let me post in Bulgarian and in English, and a service that will serve the Bulgarian version to those who do not read English and the English version to those who do not read Bulgarian. I can have the two versions of the text in the same message, but this is clumsy and looks ugly. Note that most of the time I do not mind writing the text twice. I do not want people to see it twice.

I think people are under estimating the parent effect. The fastest growing demographics on facebook are the older demographics. What are all these 45+ people doing? They're adding their children as friends. Teenagers and 20 somethings alike can't fail to accept the request (what are they hiding) but at the same time this opens lots of issues for them in terms of sharing content and having parents comment on their (and their friend's) posts. Personally, I think this effect is being massively overlooked and my hunch would be that it's driving the decline in users in the US and UK.

The issue for Google+ is 2 fold: is this a big enough problem for this age group (my feeling is yes, even if it's not apparent yet) and secondly are they cool enough to get this demographic migrating across. I think the answer to the last part is no.

In the medium term, I simply see facebook realising this problem and developing similar functionality to more easily manage groups of individuals.

I read your article last night with great interest after having joined Google+ earlier in the day. At first I was wowed by the circles. They do look so good and I thought "finally I can separate clients, friends and family. Woohoo."

However, once the initial excitement wore off, I realised that I wouldn't be able to cope with updating Google+ circles, facebook, twitter etc. Something would have to go. My thoughts turned to my facebook page and all my "friends". If I could put them into circles right now, who would go where? To my surprise, I wasn't comfortable separating any of them.

And then it hit me! My attitude towards facebook has changed. I don't really want little circles. I want wide open space! I want random, unexpected and interesting. On facebook I've got use to cringe worthy, silly and dumb comments, because they come with fun, wow and wonderful. (And these days I notice more of the latter). Just like my friends, clients and family members, I post comments that not everyone is interested in or finds relevant. But because we've all agreed to come together, share parts of our lives on facebook and be ourselves warts and all, it's quite liberating. Until yesterday I didn't realise how much facebook has helped me to be more tolerant, open minded and accepting.

So for now I've decided that I'm not going to put anyone in a circle. I'm going to stay with facebook and just see what happens. I'm not sure if I'm an average facebook user, but if I am, then somehow joining Google+ yesterday has somehow made me realise how much I really like facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Isn't that funny?

I must be the oddball; I DO care about limiting my posts to particular groups. On Facebook, I ended up hiding people who post 6x a day about their pet passions and then I completely forget I'm connected to them. I post certain things only to local friends, others to family and trusted friends, others to my autism community followers, etc., to reduce the risk of being blocked. And yes, it is EASY to do this on Facebook! Google + has no advantage in this area (heck, I can even hide posts from particular people or groups). Sure, we all want everyone to be fascinating by every post and tweet, but if you're filtering what comes in, you have to see that other people want to do that,t too.
You're right about controlling INCOMING info. On Facebook, I used to be able to check in to my autism followers when I allotted time to catch up on them; now I have to weed through Top News and News Feed to see if they posted, then check them out individually. That's a huge problem for me and it sounds like Google + may not be any help in that area. Why should I learn a whole new Facebook-esque interface and have to work into my life yet another social media network? There has to be a compelling reason.
Improved privacy? Perhaps it doesn't provide as many hurdles and glitches as Facebook does, but Google is so tone-deaf to the user experience that they will post an ad seconds after you type a keyword into a private Gmail. It may be a bot, but it feels like Big Brother is watching you--creepy. Thus, I don't trust Google's brand any more than I do Facebook's when it comes to privacy.

http://www.nancypeske.com

@Mark To answer your question, no, it's not worth a huge amount of time to categorize your circles but it's worth some time. It's similar to taking a few minutes to think about your personal level of privacy. I thought about privacy early on and have developed some simple rules I adhere to. It just took a few minutes and it's helped me traverse the ever-more-public social netwaves.

Fantastic writeup. I couldn't agree more.

It's interesting to see that many of the commenters are saying that they like to have that split of the audience into different groups of people who would be interested in a certain subject. I totally understand that, but the flaw I see there is that we have to make guesses about who would and wouldn't be interested. Sure, I can create a circle for the people interested in the political articles I share, but how do I really know who would and wouldn't be interested in it? It's possible (even likely) that in choosing other people for your categories rather than having people choose what they do and don't see of yours, you're leaving out some of the people who would be most interested, and including some of the people who really don't want to see it and who have to hide you to escape it.

Ultimately, I think that a social network has to be very simple and understandable for most people, with ways of customizing it under the surface for those of us who want that. You're absolutely right that Circles are appealing to the tech crowd, but for the average user, why are they being given the more detailed control right off the bat?

mark -- yes to all, plus (+): to the extent that the circles mediate the feed that's exactly the answer to the question

also: i have not ever and will not ever post a single photo of my kid on facebook or google plus; they get emailed the old fashioned way to exactly those i want to see them

that said, there are a few dog pix online ... but who knows what they do when nobody is home

xoxox

I really like Google+. I belive this app probably will be more integrated over the time cause we start to see it in Gmail for example. I think it is not a fight against facebook cause google has everything (mail, video and so on...) just need to delivery a good UX. This is what Google+ does.

Great post, it's not about providing "publishing granularity" as a user need or desire, it's about teaching "publishing granularity" to users in order to drive ad targeting granularity.

Reach and Frequency via search = Adwords

Reach, Frequency and Gmail = Adwords+

Reach, Frequency, Gmail and Google+ profile data = Adwords++++

Here's a snippet from the Google+ privacy policy:
"We will record information about your activity - such as posts you comment on and the other users with whom you interact - in order to provide you and other users with a better experience on Google services.

We may also collect information about you from other users, such as when someone puts you in one of their circles or tags you in a photo. Some users may choose to display information about you publicly, such as by displaying your public profile name and photo on their Google Profile in a list of people they’ve added to their circles."

Imagine this scenario: user searches keyword "swimming", user's Gmail account contains high frequency of keywords "swim" and "swimming" and user's google+ profile intro and bragging rights includes references to keywords "swim" and "swimmer".

Imagine the average CPC (cost per click) and conversion levels for this type of "weighted" keyword campaign.

It's all about Adwords...plus.

Super gnarly insight, Mark.

It is simple and logical. The idea of "success" is meaningless until Google promotes Google pluzz from "field trial" status to general availability.

People have already commented this but I'll reiterate. It's the public circle option that makes G+ bigger than Facebook and more manageable than Twitter. I don't think G+ is better on the family and friends level. But on the public social level it has already blown them out of the water.

@Jason - can you give an example.. for an average Facebook user, if they were to move to G+, what aspect of the experience would "blow them out of the water," when creating a public post?

I think you're dead wrong when you say that people don't care about posting only to specific circles. It seems you're basing it largely on what you have or haven't' seen people publicly post a comment on. I've often wished I could easily post a status to a specific group of friends on facebook, yet I've never commented about the issue online. I've heard other friends voice similar desires, but have never seen even one of them comment about it online. Just because people don't voice a complaint, doesn't mean they aren't at all concerned with it. I've seen people untag themselves in photos on Facebook because they didn't want certain ones of their friends to see that photo.

Google is billing it more as a "share with who would be interested" feature, but in reality, it's much more likely to be used as a "DON'T share with people I'd rather not have see this" feature, and I think it stands to be a big success on that front.

To me the question of success is going to be can Google get a large enough user base, before Facebook implements alot of the features that might draw users to G+. I think G+ has the potential to knock facebook off it's throne, but if and only if, they can attract enough users before facebook has the chance to respond.

I'm with Carsen. I have to constantly mentally edit my FB Post to make sure they will not offend anyone. That's annoying. Second, I contend Google+ is not trying to replace Facebook. It's geared to be something very different even though it looks similar. I'd almost suggest it has more in common with Outlook than Facebook when you consider that in the GSphere you can also manage your mail, your tasks, and your contacts. Besides, who said it has to be a competition? + and Facebook can both certainly exist. I think this article is the next batch we can expect as Google Plus rolls out. A week ago we had the yee ha Facebook killer posts and now we have the reflective mild naysayer posts. In a month, when there's no "wave" to catch to build your list all of it will go away.

I work with a lot of young people. They definitely need to be able to separate what they share with their friends from what a prospective employer, for example, can see. "Email is for old people."

You ALMOST had me, but the slam about "taking pictures of your house" was the wrong one to use. It may sound odd, but what looked like the most obvious intrusion by Google (catching you sunbathing nude) was its most UN intended. That was just another bit of set-up to get you to use maps, so it could collect more data on you and serve you better ads. G+ is no different - just one more GOOG forum to capture what you do so it can serve you "more tailored" ads (and collect more money from AdWords advertisers. It's a pretty simple business model, with a "way to get there" that seems to endlessly confound the pundits..

As soon as I got my Google + account I posted to all my other (web dev & design) friends on there that I was going to let them vet it out for me before I get sucked down another social media rabbit hole. Sigh. Another awesome post Mark, will you be my friend on Google+?

Consider the possibility that g+ is not a Facebook adversary even though it's the closest thing mapping to it at the moment. Consider the play that g+ is making is, instead, a strategy for cloud integration and providing broad capabilities (not just social stuff and not just desktop stuff). Judging from that angle, google+ may succeed wildly over the long term. But people will need to recognize what they get for it and not get distracted by circles. Personally, I think the circles piece of it is getting too much hype, probably because it's an interface people have not dealt with much in the past - so it gets the spotlight. But I don't think circles is the whole point of g+. Evaluating it on that merit alone is failing to see the rest of the iceberg.

@Tracee, what's an example or two of the "broad capabilities" - beyond the social stuff - that G+ is offering, and people are missing, as they evaluate it?

Mark - just looking at the left side of the sandbar at the top: email, calendar, documents, photos, reader, videos, news. It may be possible that Microsoft is the adversary instead of Facebook. Getting all of these artifacts on a cloud in a way that is accessible for both personal and professional use. I also wonder what it does to Jive. You know what I mean?

Mark - Great insights as usual. And I am glad someone else agrees with me on Google and privacy. I think Google knows way too much about me already. I am definitely not trusting them More than Facebook. I read a story today on Mashable about there attempt to "clean house with account suspensions - http://mashable.com/2011/07/26/google-plus-common-names/ - and how they are going about it just adds to my unease. I may do something - eventually - with Google+ but I think there is a point for most of us where we are reaching a point of Social Media Saturation - how much of this can you keep up? If you have a blog, and accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter - where do you have the bandwidth to add Google+? I guess they are hoping we drop one or more of our existing networks to move to theirs - but I am pretty happy with the way I segregate my interactions between LinkedIn (professional) and Facebook (personal) and don't see a huge advantage to combining the two. I am in a different frame of mind when I go and interact with these sites - and I find that separation useful.

There are various factors in native G+, in addition to the ever growing set of community extensions that - for a number of us at least - make the experience significantly better than FB, Twitter and other services.

First, it is so significantly faster and smoother a user experience than FB. The performance alone is a tremendous win.

Second, my G+ stream is now simply the few respected industry voices, key contacts, close friends and family members that I'm particularly interested in hearing from regularly. Nothing else. My other circles work wonderfully as "in other news" secondary feeds, that I can drop into as I need to. The gushing noise of the Twitter Hydrant has been effectively muted. How did I achieve that? One simple extension to my Chrome browser.

Third, G+ is now my predominant Social network feed. I use another Chrome extensions to selectively cross-post to FB, Twitter, Identica, etc, and this all works pretty smoothly. I can also see my "streams" from Twitter and FB as additional streams within the same G+ UI.

Forth, although I still post a number of things publicly, I can now elect to post stuff for just my family, my colleagues, my close friends, and my local hood. And I do. I agree that my public stream still seems to be keeping precedence, but for people who have multi-contextual lives outbound circles are fantastic. Who really cares about an invitation to a local event, but my local hood? I don't want my folks of my work colleagues to see the jokes I'm sharing with my close friends. I have many and varied interests: honestly, most of my connections don't really care for all of them. This was always somewhat painful to address with FB and Twitter: now I have a simple mechanism to gate my outbound stream. I just hope other folks "get it" and follow similar communications restraint.

And a comment about the FB-like nature of G+. Really? They're both websites that let you post info: pictures, text, etc, where you have an identity as part of community, can have your own profile page, etc. Right? Sites that enable this have existed before the Internet ever really took shape (BBS's), and have been present pretty much ever since the Net became a public phenomenon. Friendster and Myspace being the two most obvious examples. Please don't discount all of our rich Internet history by claiming that FB was the first existence of such services: it was simply the thing the late majority happened to notice and adopt en masse. But my point is that, fundamentally, these are all just browser-delivered user experiences: how different can they possibly be in look and feel?

Like any new tech, the real value of it will take time for folks to grok, and I predict it will be at least 3 years before my folks or my distant relatives find their way there. Of course new usage capabilities are evolving in G+ land daily, so that may hasten the arrival of others. Only time will tell. But having weathered many new product experiences, G+ for me feels as much the fundamental game changer that google search, gmail and google docs were.

I have a significant point of partial disagreement. You claim that helping people read fewer posts is of no value to people who create content. I have direct evidence that you're wrong, but Google+ has so far failed to create the feature that would demonstrate that.

That feature is "public circles". Those would be circles that I can create, that other people can subscribe themselves to. And anything shared with a public circle would have no resharing restrictions. (Because, you know, it is public.) To name a few places where this has been independently suggested, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-schlicht/google-should-add-public-_b_904137.html, https://plus.google.com/116872576248355504859/posts/gn3uQfCFyRs (take a look at how many thousands of people agreed there!), and https://plus.google.com/117373186752666867801/posts/6WN5vhHUfoV (take a look from the comments there from people whose unfilterable content creation forced them to not be able to use social media with people in their personal lives). Between the +1s on those links, I have direct evidence that a minimum of thousands of people want and benefit from this feature.

Here is why it matters. Those of us (like myself) who are talkative know full well that we like to talk about things that are not of interest to ALL of our friends and family. But I don't actually know which friends want which kinds of content. (And having to guess, and have them tell me, is socially very awkward. As well as being a lot of work for me.) And if I post something that someone finds interesting, I don't mind at all if it is publicly reshared by them.

So circles, as they currently exist, don't help me in that use case. I'm forced to choose between not talking, spamming people I know full well don't really want it, or making private (and mostly hidden) stuff that I want to be public. None are good choices. (I mostly am deciding between not talking and spamming.)

But if they fix that then I'm perfectly happy to categorize my outgoing content. And if I could do that, then I could simultaneously produce more content, and have friends receive less content. (But if they want, better targeted content.) Which means that people's incoming is better targeted to what they actually want to hear.

You hit it right on the head. G+ is a good start to ensure that you only publish to a particular circle. However, I have friends in my "techie" circle, but I don't want to get posts about their social life.

Maybe the short-term way out is to have a "reply" feature which only goes to the circle of your friend who posted to that circle (of which you are a member).

I'm 15 and loving G+. I rarely go on Facebook anymore, even though I have only a few people on G+. Maybe it's just because of that "new car smell"? I love Google anyways, and I'm glad they came out with something to tie a lot of their apps together. But I agree with many of your points.

I just don't see the majority of my "friends" on Facebook, mainly being high school students, thinking really hard about who to share things with, and who not to share things with. Even having a ton of specific groups of friends to put in "circles" seems a bit far-fetched for many high schoolers, I think.
A good majority of them, like you said, only want to be heard by posting to the masses and thus will probably stick to Facebook. I definitely think that that G+ is for the older, or perhaps, the more mature population.

So, I'm probably going to end up sticking with Facebook, unless somehow Google+ ends up appealing to the average teenager.

Mark, I don't understand your complaint. Yes, in Google+, along the left edge, there is a link called "stream" which is the firehose of all your circles combined. But just below that are links for each of your circles, links which filter the stream view to just show the incoming posts from people in the circle you've selected.

Facebook has "Lists", which are hard to find and set up and even harder to use as a news feed filter. Google+'s implementation of filtering the incoming status stream is a vast improvement over Facebook's.

Your critique seems more suited to Facebook than to Google+, it seems.

That all being said, I'm not thrilled by Google+ for some of the same reasons you aren't: managing and classifying my friends is far from what I consider to be a worthwhile use of the time I have to spend alive, here on Earth.

@Christopher: You're right that the G+'s usability (i.e., of the tool) improved over the usability of Facebook. Lists are easier to set up and manage on G+. But I'm not primarily concerned with the tool.

I'm proposing a different frame of reference: the user. G+ improved the usability of the TOOL; I'm suggesting that they didn't fully address the needs of the USER.

I think you make some interesting points here. I agree that G+ is going to be successful (at least in the short term), but I have to disagree about a couple of things:

Circles solve the problem that Twitter lists solve. I follow back on Twitter. That means I end up with a lot of content in my main stream that I may not find relevant to my interests. So, I've created lists for my primary sources of content/information, and those are the streams that I actually follow regularly.

G+ solves the same issue. For the broader audience, it's not so much about limiting the number of people that see your post, it's about limiting the content that you're filtering through (e.g. checking your "Friends" circle stream and not having it be populated by that person in high school that you never spoke with, but still friended you).

In a world where Facebook has become a dumping ground for every friend, awkward family member, colleague, acquaintance and random person you don't really know, G+ actually allows you to limit the content you see to the ones you're actually interested in. It allows you to toggle between your interest graph vs. your broad social graph.

From a publishing standpoint, it also allows you to filter what your audience sees. People complain that their bosses friend them on Facebook, and now they can't post any pictures of a wild night out with friends or post any racy social commentary. Well...now there's a solution to that. Publish different content to different circles.

I think G+ has a lot of potential for giving people more control of their social identity that we haven't yet realized.

It will interesting to see how Google+ impacts B2B marketing once they open up the Business pages. What are you thoughts on which will better cater to businesses - FB or Google+ ???