So true. The red notification really hooks you back in.

It's because Google+'s social signal to noise ratio is so much higher than Facebook. I dread the red notifications in FB's upper left corner bc they're usually from some friend of friend's irrelevant spam event/survey/tagging etc. Google+ Circles really filters thats out.

Facebook's mistake was introducing Groups so late. With Circles, users can create Circles AS friends join. I will never retroactively organize my Facebook "friends" into Groups. I will, however, take a little time each day as new REAL friends come to Google+ to organize them to reflect real social structure.

Google 1. Facebook 0.