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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

I tried to get into Google+ but there really isn't a reason to switch. I have no complaints with Facebook. They have the people I want to talk to and the features I like. They've made a lot of changes in response to G+. I now have better control over who can see which messages and I can organize my friends into lists. I really don't have the time to watch over two social networks. At this point any competitor to Facebook is going to be a hard sell.

G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

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In my usage G+ is not at all like Facebook.

The big difference is that Facebook is highly oriented towards "small circle of people I know in real life" and slowly opening up things to be more public.

G+ is highly oriented towards public with features to allow more private sharing. It's more like Posterous, really, than Facebook.

The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

My G+ usage is pretty orthogonal to Facebook usage and is more like following blogs in an RSS reader.

>The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

With Facebook's new follow feature (released this week) you can follow those people on Facebook as well.

Facebook even partially solves the Scoble problem by asking you if you want to subscribe to all, some, or only the most important posts from a person and Blake Ross has mentioned that they may be doing further things to help filter what you see on your wall (perhaps classify posts by subject?)

That is exactly what I use G+ for, it's my work life, and tech industry circle. Facebook is more for the family network where I can't really post anything about development because my cousin that works as a chef wouldn't understand. And yeah you can use lists, but now the main facebook wall feed is a potpurry of a lot of things I don't really care for.

>The concrete difference is that on Facebook I follow friends and coworkers, on G+ I follow Scoble, Tim O'Reilly, Alton Brown and other people who write interesting, public posts.

But I feel those use-cases have less overall appeal for everyday people. Everyday people want to see what their friends are up to, something facebook does very well.

>>G+ may look pretty busy right now because they opened it up for everyone but I think most people will have the same reaction I did -- it gets old quick.

We'll know by the end of the year how it works out. However, a lot of Nokia,blackberry customers used to say similar things about the iPhone when it first came out, and look what happened. So, lets not discount G+ just yet.

Facebook did improve a lot. To an ordinary user, G+ does not offer enough to convince them to switch.

They have the people I want to talk to

I must have gotten precociously old and grumpy, but such phrases give me the creeps.

Those new intelligent lists are just great.

So great that the user calloc on HN had this to say about them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018403

This is my exact experience as well, and it has completely turned me off from putting people into circles, the last thing I want is for them to have to accept or ignore some suggestion by Facebook because I dropped them in one list or another.

Or creepy.

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