It makes me consider their roll-out strategy. They roll out to a tech crowd, we understand that there are issues, we understand that the product is unfinished but at the same time journalists will jump at it for having issues. Every advantage has its disadvantage I guess. The advantage is that you have known brand and you get traction pretty fast. The disadvantage is that you have a known brand and people have expectations.
As far as circles go, I simply think it's going to be too complex for the casual user. FB is black and white, either you are part of my friends or you are not. As has been said, basically noone uses the lists. Anyone I remotely know has access to my profile because I trust them enough that they won't do anything really nasty. People I don't know I simply don't know. G+ offers you options and I don't think that will fair well with non technical users. I already noticed it when "Gee, this sorting thing is fun" changed to "Sorting my 200 contacts into circles was so tedious".
People are already crying out for meta-circles which add another layer of abstraction on top of the existing models. Some want to have full boolean function control with the ability to create Venn diagrams.
It doesn't matter if they fix what we've told them to fix. It won't matter if I get an option to view my stream in a chronological order rather then posts being bumped to the top. What matters is that there are cheatsheets circulating on G+ which hints that even the tech savvy crowd needs assistance to figure out the product, now imagine teenagers trying to figure out G+? I remember reading that the main reason why Twitter is not massively booming in user adaption like FB is because teenagers indicate that it's too complicated. I see the same thing happening here. G+ could take a bite out of twitter, skype and maybe even foursquare (although foursquare has attractive game mechanics which lacks in G+ to my knowledge) but it does not offer the same idiot-proof system that fb does.
Arik Beremzon • Insert a dynamic date here
