I don't buy that normal people care about analytics and stats and 'animating how their post moves around the internet' - might be cool for us geeks, or the marketers might find it useful, but for the ultimate success or failure of g+ I'm betting this feature will be entirely irrelevant. Twitter shouldn't waste their time worrying about this.
I couldn't agree more. Also I would like to add that most people's post don't get many reshares which mean this feature is completely useless for their post.
I get the feeling that the Ripples feature isn't designed for the average consumer. It's aimed at the marketing crowd. They can easily find out who the big "share hubs" are, and leverage that to potentially help promote their product or stay in contact with their community.
This is a project by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (at least, that's what I've heard). You can see some of their other work at http://hint.fm.