Why I think Google+ will fail

Let’s be clear about this upfront. These are my initial impressions with the service. It doesn’t mean that they can’t change midway along with the evolution of the service. But as it stands, the path I see ahead is not promising. Let me break it to you then:

Stream
Stream has a pretty basic layout, very Facebook-esque and nothing to write home about. It’s competent and that’s it. Despite some minor usability quirks where it’s hard to figure it if it’s a control or a plain heading text, it’s good at what it is.  

Photos
Visually it’s beautifully laid out but hard to split in chunks. It’s mixing every photo from every user I have listed as friend, so it’s hard to figure out who posted out. Yes, you can read the captions but that’s less than convenient. And the slideshow feature feels like an afterthought. Also, don’t get me started on instant upload. That’s scary as hell. I like to control which pictures get posted, thank you very much.

Circles
Circles are a gimmick. They’re basically buddy lists and the interface almost demands that you dump your friends into the right bucket. As anyone working in user profiling and segmentation could tell you, this is really hard to do. A bucket determines the kind of updates people see and some updates might be directed at more than one circle, but you can’t do that. You can add a friend to one or more circles, but then the nightmare of managing all of this starts. It kind of works if you have 30 buddies or so but it soon breaks apart. I just can’t see this working for the number of users people generally have on Facebook (+100). And I’m not even mentioning the hassle of having to add all your friends to a new social network yet again.

Hangout
Like pictures, this seems to be here just because they have a video chat feature and thought it was cool to add it. In real life, I doubt that a couple of friends would gather up online to talk to eachother via face chat at the same time. Yes, the novelty factor is there, but apart from a few tries at first, I see this dead at the water. Now, for business it makes sense, but this is a personal platform and doesn’t feel right to be using it for that.

Huddle
I’ve seen good comments about this, but I can’t figure out where this feature is hiding. So I’ll leave it for later. 

So yes, a new social network built by Google. Is this their third try? Can’t blame them for trying? Is it going to replace Facebook? I don’t think so. Facebook is built around social and it’s going to be hard to mimic all its features. So, for now, I’ll see all the geeks and early adopters get really excited about the service, but if doesn’t change paths, it’s going into the dustbin like many others.