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"Google has made moves to indicate that Google+ is not a finished product, or even a 1.0 release."

Honestly I hope Google destroys FB but let's stop apologizing for their half finished releases. G+ was released 9 months ago. For 6 months they've defaulted new g-mail users to sign up for it. This is not a beta, full stop.

If it's unfinished, if there are no APIs, if they broke a lot of the custom apps that were made for their struggling social service with their month 9 redesign, those aren't things you make excuses for. Those are things you list as negatives.

For any other company, sure. Google has a habit of pushing incomplete products out.

When Minecraft was first released to play, was that broken? Was Notch making excuses when he said "I'm still working on it"? Was it not continuously updated. And he charged money for that. Let's not forget how long GMail was in "beta". Google does betas. They push unfinished products out, for free, and update them continuously until they are finished. That's not a negative, that's Google being Google. Anyone who's been on the Internet for more than a year knows this is how they operate, and that most of the time it ends up being pretty cool.

The comparison with Minecraft is absurd. Google already has a whole ecosystem of well-rounded services. They have huge amounts of resources (both money and brains). They removed the "labs" feature by themselves and I take it as a sign that they don't want to push unfinished products to users this way. And when you force users who use Gmail to sign up for Google Plus, it's clearly not a beta product anymore, it's production ready because you are welcoming users by the truckload.

Don't use the "this service is beta" flag as an excuse for the flaws of Google+ and their (mostly horrible) redesigns of their core services. It's clearly not the old Google anymore.

I think the parent's point is that if that's how you're going to roll, it can count as a negative. There's a difference between breaking functionality, and not providing new features until it's ready.

Google Plus is not marketed as a beta product. With all the computer science-type smart folks at Google, I don't understand why big breakage is OK.

> They push unfinished products out, for free, and update them continuously until they are finished.

Well, it's not 'free', since the users are the product. And yes, some things get finished, other unfinished things like Wave just get cut at some point.

I don't understand why big breakage is OK.

Did they break their published APIs? They've only ever published a handful of frankly useless API calls. If it was someone just scraping unpublished routines, that's hardly Google's fault.

"Google+ is not and never will be (and never wanted to be) a Facebook"

Tell that to my new Google+ Cover Photo....

Even if all of your points are valid, you must admit they keep releasing numbers trying to show it's this super fast growing network, and yet you can see just by the number of sites that have a G+ button, that people are not even engaging in that level of activity. Pinterest on the other hand, which has actual user engagement is already starting to overtake Google on these little + buttons.

I knew Google+ wanted to be Facebook when I saw you could comment on posts.

Sure, but by their definition someone who visits Google+ once and then never does anything with Google except search for the rest of time still counts as an active Google+ user.

Those people simply aren't engaged in any kind of social layer, and yet Google is reporting them as if they are.

It might not be correct to measure Google+ as if it were a direct equivalent to Facebook, but that doesn't make the numbers they are releasing any less misleading.

If Google+ runs as deep as Google seems to imply it does, anyone using Google search while signed in is "using" Google+. I know when I do searches, I get results based on what people I know have been sharing. If I search for "putty", my top result is the PuTTY client, because lots of Google+ users have visited the page or liked it or shared it or something. I can see under the search result how many people +1'd it.

I'd consider that "using" Google+ the way I understand Google+ to work. You don't need to use it as a Facebook in order to experience the "plus" in Google+ (criticisms about SPYW aside).

Ok, but that definition still renders the numbers meaningless - it's just a box you happen to see forever onwards if you've ever said yes to one of their prominent enticements to find out what Google+ is.

If they told us how many Google+ members use those results, and how often they are picked in comparison to the non+ results, that would tell us something that justifies using that definition.

As it stands, the numbers only tell us how many people clicked through a very prominent ad.

The reality is that Google+ is both a standalone social network as well as a layer being added into both Google properties and sites across the web. It's not illogical that when Google gives out numbers talking about Google+ "users" that it would clarify those actually using the social network as opposed to those effectively accidentally using it because, you know, they logged into Gmail.

> Google+ is not and never will be (and never wanted to be) a Facebook

I perfectly agree and I have been saying that myself. But it's also true that Google+ does have a component which is comparable to Facebook. The main Google+ stream page, is not all of what Google+ is. But it is comparable to Facebook and other social networks.

And personally, I would love if Google gave me the real number of how many users are actually using that stream. How many are actively posting, etc.

Yep. I bet a hotpot dinner that this Google+ new home will aggregate all your content, including mails, and become the default home for Google, which would explain why currently the logo on Gmail is not a link anymore.

The logo doesn't do anything on several Google properties, not just gmail. And actually prior to this refresh it didn't do anything on G+ either, which annoyed me to no end.

They made this change a few weeks back and I honestly don't know why.

You make many good points. However, you failed to stick to the dominant narrative on HN, so expect some more downvotes. Google+ is a massive failure. Groupon is a ponzi scheme. Zynga is evil.