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> I don't know why people keep insisting that G+ is a waste land. If you personally don't use it, or see a use for it, that's fine, but there are many people in the world who are not you.

It's more that nobody I know uses it. All of my friends are on Facebook, and everyone is talking about Facebook. If I try finding my friends on Google+, it looks like a wasteland.

> They are integrating so many of their services into G+, that you can pretty much guarantee that it's a winner (for them, at least).

Why should I care if it's a winner for them? Google has a huge reach, and they are leveraging that reach to push Google+, but people are still uploading photos and updating their status on Facebook. Google+ may have many unique users, but their use is far more shallow than their use of Facebook.

>If you personally don't use it, or see a use for it, that's fine, but there are many people in the world who are not you.

I wholly agree, but G+ is barely better than tribe.net (for me and my peer group) when you compare it to what Facebook has in terms of content and users. There's also the whole "Nym" issue. I also can't understand why people are excited by giving Google MORE data, the "don't be evil" days are clearly over with.

They are integrating search so tightly with G+ that websites/authors have to get a G+ profile to make authorship data visible in search.

A fairer way would have been to use microdata alone to achieve the same thing. This would have been acceptable to other search engines too.

> G+ isn't for everyone, and that's fine. It is a product which is now highly polished, and provides exactly what I and many other people have wanted from a social network.

Is it possible yet to change the visibility of old posts? The absence of small privacy features like this—features that FB does have—always was very off-putting for me. When Google+ was launched they made a huge deal out of Circles, but it strikes me that since then Google has pushed Google+ more as an alternative to Twitter than as an alternative to Facebook (and I don't like Twitter much).

Anyway, I used Google+ so little that I deleted my account in a petty rage when they shut down Google Reader. It's actually nice to have one less social network to worry about.

> Is it possible yet to change the visibility of old posts? The absence of small privacy features like this—features that FB does have...

Are you sure you have thought this through? Allowing retro-active changes to visibility (unless it's only in a more restrictive direction) can be a privacy violation for the commenters, who may have commented based on the original visibility list. And allowing visibility changes towards a more restrictive set will confuse the people who could see the post till yesterday, might even have commented on it, and suddenly can't see it anymore.

Privacy decisions are not as simple as they might appear on a cursory glance, and overall I find that G+ takes privacy very seriously. Seen from the above light, the current policy of not allowing visibility changes, but allowing the author to delete the post, makes a lot more sense.

I disagree.

Allowing more people to see a post is already possible by adding people to the circles that you shared the post with.

Social is inevitably a winner take all market, so in this case the ignoramuses who never use G+ who declare it dead are probably right. Its not about great features, just ask FriendFeed.

Why do you believe that social is a winner take all market?

Metcalfe's Law.

I hope you're being facetious. While (for instance) Facebook's ubiquity will insulate it for many years, come what may, raw connection numbers aren't nearly as important as local connection numbers, and "local" can mean many things, including distance on an interest graph. For instance, I joined Twitter (and Google+, for that matter) because there were interesting conversations happening there and I wanted to take part. Those networks continue to sustain interest for me, so I contribute, and that brings interest to other people, etc.

There might not be a steady state (either becoming abandoned over time, growing to monstrous proportions of popularity, or changing character enough to drive old timers away, or some combination of the three), but all the evidence for the entire history of social groupings suggest that other social groupings will pop up to take the place of any that fail and to fill in niches no longer served. It's certainly not zero sum.

Metcalfe's law was also only ever meant to be an observation (and really just boils down to a description of any network, with "value" being some nebulous term), and certainly was never meant to describe humans' social connections, if only because they cannot sustain an arbitrary number of them. Applying it to social networks for predictive purposes is just sloppy sociology, which is about as low as you can get.

I wasn't being facetious, I just hadn't thought it through as thoroughly as you have. Good points.