Nothing like an article about Facebook written by someone who admits he hates seeing people, "waste time," on Facebook!
Regardless, I Find using Google+ is just easier. For example, if I want to change my profile picture, all my Picassa albums are right there (as well as phone pics). I can choose any picture I want and edit it right there, in Google+, and poof! New profile pic. I rarely change my profile picture in FB because, frankly, it's a hassle. Maybe not a huge hassle, but the process involves logging into Flickr (or Picassa or whatever), or finding a file on a hard drive, then going back to FB to upload or link the photo, then cropping it from there, then posting. It's always seemed like too much of a bother.
Same goes for Sparks. Rather than find an article on the Web, then copy the URL, go to FB, share it, yadda yadda... I just peruse Sparks (essentially Google News as far as I can tell), find something interesting and hit, "share."
And, of course, there's the invaluable Circles. I can finally brag to a selected social circle that I logged forty hours playing Call of Duty without revealing to everyone else what a total slacker I am.
Personally, I've never been a huge FB fan, but my move to Google+ has more to do with its superior design as opposed to rebelling against FB. So far, Google+ just seems more fun to me.
I think all of the complaints about Facebook policies have finally caught up with the company. Respecting your privacy is not about allowing users to create private groups or circles. It's about respect. When you sign up to a service offered by a company and accept its terms and conditions, you expect that company to respect those terms and conditions, but if those terms and those conditions keep changing all the time, people are going to be pissed off.
I noticed this with people who have looked at and reviewed Google+. They all make a comment about how the privacy settings are better or easier to access or less intrusive. This small factor is almost always mentioned, including in this video:
Sure there is: it's Not Facebook. That means a lot, really:
No Aunt Martha seeing those pics from Atlantic City that you might otherwise like to post for your real friends to see.
No friend requests from that asshole in high school that used to beat you up and now wants to pretend that everything's copacetic.
No Farmville spam.
No six-times-a-day status updates from that one person in your circle that just loves to "hear" themselves "speak"
No profit for Zuck.
You get the picture: there are a lot of reasons that people have left Facebook lately. It no longer has the exclusivity that drew the early adopters originally, and as we're getting older and realizing more and more that we want some privacy, Facebook has resisted making it easy to come by.
Even better, beyond just being pre-Eternal September (and let's face it, once Aunt Martha is on Facebook, it's that time...), G+ has mechanisms in place that seem likely to keep the S/N ratio that I see high for a good long while.
Sure, plenty of people don't care, and they'll keep using Facebook, and that's fine. But right now, the most important thing that differentiates G+ to me is that the people I care about interacting with are actually using it, even though many of them haven't been active on Facebook for months, if not years.
But Aunt Martha joining facebook in the first place is the reason it has been succesful, and differentiated itself from the likes of myspace. One day you may be an Uncle, if you aren't already, and may want to stay connected to your nieces and nephews, see what they are up to, even if you don't see or speak with them as much. That will matter a lot to you then, even if it doesn't now.
Facebook is evolving into a globally connected network of people.
Google + is a toy for the technorati.
Circles, Huddles, Hangouts: Those all seem pretty different from Facebook to me. The only part of + that seems similar to Facebook is the interface of streams (which admittedly, is very similar.)
I tend to think that the similarity of 'Streams' is mainly due to the fact that that is what a social information feed looks like. It's kinda of like saying "Those word processors all copying each other with their large text areas and blinking cursors and menus" That's just because that is what works for a word processor, as the 'Stream' feed works for social updates. Just my thoughts anyhow.
I'm not sure this was obvious until Friendfeed became so popular that Facebook acquired and integrated them into their redesign in 2009. It seems like a pretty recent innovation to me.
The current 'mature' design may have been somewhat recent but that's the general distillation process of software evolution. I think in general all successful software products of similar intent migrate towards a fairly common UI layout which works best for interacting with that type of data. Not too often we see paradigm shifts in software UI's for established tasks.
I agree on the backlash against facebook, I think this would be understandable user behavior. The problems I still have with Google+ are two:
1. the name, there is not a simple way to make it a verb, would you say you are "plusing" or how would you say that you want to plus me?
2. it would be difficult for it to become as popular as facebook because there are alreasy lots of social graphs in facebook already established. The argument that users would change because of the privacy TOS is flawed, because many users don't care about the privacy stuff.
"2. it would be difficult for it to become as popular as facebook because there are alreasy [sic] lots of social graphs in facebook already established."
A few points to consider:
1. I'm not an early adopter, of anything, ever.
2. I've managed to mirror 100% of the Facebook contacts I give a shit about in Google+ in less than 24 hours, with substantially improved organization & compartmentalization, not to mention a noticeable lack of ads or Zynga spam.
3. A full third of my FB contacts have requested a G+ invite as soon as they heard I was already in.
4. All of the people I've invited or otherwise added to my circles are active in their G+ accounts.
1. I think Google's ultimate goal is to bring you into an environment where you are just "Googling". This is evidenced by the top bar whenever you are on a Google site. They aren't trying to make it so that you are actively participating in a social media site like when you are facebooking, they are trying to make your entire presence on the net a social experience. There is no need for you to be "plusing" as you will be "plusing" simply by being online. No longer do you need to have a tab left open for your Facebook, your social media experience is fulfilled by leaving your email open.
2. One interesting counterpoint to this is how Google+ is growing. Certainly there are some people coming from websites/forums asking for invites but I would bet money that at least as many are coming from people posting on facebooks themselves. Facebook's own established network is working against them here.
The privacy debate is really not that important in the end. People who care about the privacy will end up posting on their facebook and inviting their friends to try Google+ (which they most likely will, it's a Google product afterall) and once they are on Google+ they will either like it more than facebook or they won't (because we have already established they don't care about the privacy aspects). In the end it comes down to which one can provide a better experience for most users and Google+ once again has the lead here because of how it can insert itself into your entire online experience.
I agree with you, in that the seamless integration into the Google experience is definitely a plus (I could not help adding the word "plus" into the sentence).
I don't think Facebook will always be as relevant as it is today. I think it's relevance will eventually fade away, and be replaced by something else. But, I just don't think it will be replaced by something like G+.
I can see G+ becoming more and more popular. But not becoming as relevant as facebook for social.
Regardless, I Find using Google+ is just easier. For example, if I want to change my profile picture, all my Picassa albums are right there (as well as phone pics). I can choose any picture I want and edit it right there, in Google+, and poof! New profile pic. I rarely change my profile picture in FB because, frankly, it's a hassle. Maybe not a huge hassle, but the process involves logging into Flickr (or Picassa or whatever), or finding a file on a hard drive, then going back to FB to upload or link the photo, then cropping it from there, then posting. It's always seemed like too much of a bother.
Same goes for Sparks. Rather than find an article on the Web, then copy the URL, go to FB, share it, yadda yadda... I just peruse Sparks (essentially Google News as far as I can tell), find something interesting and hit, "share."
And, of course, there's the invaluable Circles. I can finally brag to a selected social circle that I logged forty hours playing Call of Duty without revealing to everyone else what a total slacker I am.
Personally, I've never been a huge FB fan, but my move to Google+ has more to do with its superior design as opposed to rebelling against FB. So far, Google+ just seems more fun to me.