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Comment by cargo8 | Hacker News Reader

Funny how much a lot of this person's complaints ring exactly like a Google+ marketing campaign, and yet no one has really mentioned Google+ yet.

I totally agree, and that's not to say that Google+'s stream isn't equally filled with content I don't care about, but that is also because I followed a random circle of 500 "interesting people".

Google+'s focus on smaller circles as it's primary feature, and I think the larger emphasis on sharing with circles and not the public at large (unless you are one of the internet famous) attempts to give user's the power to interact in this way. And if you use gmail, it's basically email + all the rich content social network benefits have to offer.

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Except it really is not. Facebook friends can be equally curated and pruned. Facebook offers its own variant of circles, and importantly my friends are on facebook which can facilitate discussion. Even though everyone has gmail and Google is forcing G+ down everybody's throat, G+ has not taken off. There is no material to discuss on G+. Besides, the same problems will creep in with G+ too. Do you want to pick and choose content to share to a particular circle? It is a good idea, but it is cumbersome.

The keywords are "can be". Or as the author put it "unless you jump through hoops". The Google+ interface makes a difference. The majority of stuff on Google+ is shared privately, because the interface invites doing it that way.

(The interface also invites having a "loudmouth" circle with zero notification level, so you can follow people without having their posts in your default stream).

It's really easy to hide people on Facebook, if you even see their stuff in the first place. Mainly, you'll see stuff from the people you interact with.

Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.

The problem with Facebook's mechanism for "hiding people" is that until you go through immense effort, your experience sucks. The "Acquaintances" list (which I might add was a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of Google+) only serves to take certain people out of your stream, while plugging in other friends that you don't care about. Until you go through this cycle (which is actually phenomenal social engineering as it is self-reinforcing - once you start you have to continue otherwise it's worse) repeatedly to prune out ALL your non-close contacts, your experience sucks.

The fact that Google+ prioritizes and emphasizes splitting friends into these circles as a PRIMARY means of organizing your friends is a huge difference. Although it is cumbersome, it is a much more realistic representation of human interaction, making friends and having different groups of friends.

Odd, but your experience is completely unlike mine, and that of everybody else I know well. I almost never see stuff from people I don't interact with (except when close friends share it, which is bad enough). In my experience, most people don't need to hide more than a couple of friends, and certainly not more than a few at once.

Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a closed group), and I often sit next to other family members using the system. I am much more familiar with it than most people, especially with non-expert users.

It does require some effort to sort Facebook friends into half a dozen channels, but Facebook suggests people to add, which actually makes it rather easy. It becomes a natural progression, over time.

Meanwhile, whatever the theoretical claims, G+ remains almost completely unusable. In my experience, it's virtually impossible to get ordinary people to use it, and they don't last more than a day or two. And from a usability point of view, Circles are crap.

Although I've used G+ quite a lot, and have something over 5,000 followers, my use has declined over time. Following the last desperate (Facebook copying) redesign, I've more or less given in...

I'm curious, how many Facebook friends do you have approximately? Two years ago I removed 600 friends, and now I still have 1200 again -__-

I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read.

And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking about? Before Google+'s most recent redesign into the multi-column pinterest-esque layout, Facebook's timeline update is in fact quite a copy of Google+'s old design (bigger pictures in speech bubbly things out of profile pictures).

I have about 500 Facebook friends, but only about two dozen in a family channel and another two dozen in a Close Friends channel. The bulk are in channels for work colleagues (big company), business contacts, and people I know who live abroad. Today, I wouldn't friend most of the business contacts, but that's ancient history.

I've lived in North America and my wife's family is Chinese so we are pretty widely spread. I have close relations in five different countries, but the majority are in Asia.

So, in an average Facebook session, I see posts from about 50 people, and I know almost all of them very well. I see a lot of baby and toddler pictures, with more to come ;-)

I have no relatives at all who use G+, and very few colleagues/business contacts who actually use it. Also, I don't see much new content there. I've usually seen it already via Twitter, Reddit, HN or RSS feeds.

I also use LinkedIn and Quora, and as a former /. and Digg user, I sometimes drop by those as well. They all have their niches. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything that G+ does better than the rest, from my point of view.

Thanks for sharing :) I find Google+ to be useful for sharing photos with people who are not on Facebook, because it still allows you to share with an email address and it works pretty well. Not sure how to do this in FB, but I bet there is a way.

Also, Hangouts is probably the biggest unique thing for Google+. By far the best web-based, free, multi-person video chatting experience IMHO. Not to mention it can be tremendously productive if need be, with in-window document editing and screensharing. It's somewhat based on the video conferencing solution that Google has been using internally for remoting into meetings for a long time.

If I want to share by emailing links I use SkyDrive, though most people seem to post pics to Facebook. SkyDrive doesn't change the size or the filenames of your pics, or "improve" them, and I have 25GB of free space.

I agree about Hangouts but it's a non-starter when none of my family is using G+. They use Facebook chat, Facebook group chat, and Skype. Hardly any of them use Gmail, so my chances of moving 30-odd people to G+ are basically zero....

With consumers, technology is a relatively small part of technology choices, and inertia is a huge factor.

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