Google+ is competing with LinkedIn and Microsoft, not Facebook
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
I have Circles set up for groups of work colleagues, professional contacts, family, and friends who I like to share fart jokes with. In each case, I can interact with those people in a manner appropriate to the nature of my relationship with them. That solves the Facebook problem for me (I didn't use it because I nearly never had anything I wanted to share with everyone I knew in the world), and also creates an environment where I can have fun with my friends and be professional with my colleagues without compromising either group.
I really like it.
That is why people (should) have different email for private and business use. That is why I have facebook and linkedin accounts. It is very unlikely that I will upload my party pics to linkedin ;)
That's awkward, and in real life, you don't have to do it. So you shouldn't have to do it online.
It's much better if I can group people into whatever circles make sense to me, and they can do the same to me. Nobody should get to see how I group people. It's my mental model of the world, not theirs.
Nobody wants to mix business, family, and friends on Facebook because whether or not it's technically possible to segment your interactions there (and yes, I get that apparently if you dig three levels deep through just the right submenus you can figure out how to do it), it's not very intuitive, and the many default visibility changes that have happened on Facebook make any mechanism for segmentation feel very brittle. It's always been clear that Facebook wasn't interested in promoting that kind of interaction, that you should unfriend people if you didn't want them to hear what you had to say (or see what you've been up to on the weekends!).
With Google+, information control one is of the most hyped core features of the service, and that's much more reassuring, it tells me that they're going to take it seriously in a way that Facebook never has.
If Facebook is the party of Saturday night with lots of cursing and drunk people, Google+ feels more like the Sunday golf session with friends or colleagues.
Just my 2 cents.
"Sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."
What was gmail that hotmail wasnt or didnt have? Well no spam... clean interface, did I say no spam? ;) and some more of those goodies, one can hope this may be something similar.
Of course that's partially just that there's not much going on there yet, compared to facebook... but the other part is a page design issue. Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere.
Aside from that, the "Circles" feature is precisely the right functionality. Why yes, I would love to be able to sort my "friends" into "people I've met at least twice" vs "people I actually like" vs "people I actually like who also live locally" and so forth.
edit: Oh, and one other major criticism: it's picky about browser, and won't work on either of my work machines. I can understand it not liking the Firefox 2.0.0.12pre that I have on my desktop machine, but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?
On the other hand, that could be a feature too. If facebook didn't work on my work machine I'd probably be more productive.
On the other hand, I really love the page design of Plus because it's nowhere near as claustrophobic as Facebook. The larger fonts and increased whitespace make me tend to slow down and read more carefully whereas I have a tendency to simply skim over Facebook posts as quickly as possible. I definitely appreciate the large photo thumbnails, too.
I don't know, it's kind of hard to put my finger on, but I'd almost say the layout feels more relaxed to me.
FWIW, Andy Hertzfeld was the UI lead on the whole project.[1]
>but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?
FF5 was just released and FF4 won't be receiving any future updates, security or otherwise. Not supporting older versions seems in line with Google's rapid iteration approach.
Although Google would probably lose if they directly competed with Facebook rather than making their own unique service, it is certainly much closer to Facebook than LinkedIn.
Imagine working on a book (or a school project): create a circle around that, then share your latest work with the circle. Anytime someone wants to annotate or change something, they all have access to the same file and comments/hangouts/etc. can be made around it.
Sci-fi and fantasy authors do this frequently albeit through email, and online book clubs.
Hell I used it back in 06 to do reference checks on independent contractors using my network for a small-group CRM project.
In future they may help you find a job or help you get connected with a senior exec at RIM, but not at this time.
v2 will do even more.