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Comment by cargo8 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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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