Why do designers keep thinking that splitting a feed into two staggered columns is a good idea? It makes it much harder to skim down a feed to find a particular post, because your eye naturally wants to skim in straight lines, not zig-zag back and forth.

This seems to me like a classic case of designers thinking of visual "prettiness" first and actual utility second.

Facebook did this for a while with Timeline, until they fixed it with the newer Timeline which keeps the posts to one column. It really looks like Google+ is just ape-ing Facebook design, even when the design has implicitly been admitted to have been a bad idea.

I am willing to be persuaded otherwise, though, if someone wants to make the case.