Google Plus’s Minuses

Like most techies at the moment, I’m right now testing/playing around with/am on Google+.

Unlike most of them, I am not feeling like the social network sun has risen once again.

Not enough of my friends are on it.  I’m getting constant reccomendations from people I vaguely recognize, but none who I actually know. (part of this is my fault, I’m always connecting with new people once or twice, and then don’t really talk to them again). The people I want/need to interact with there, aren’t early adopter at all. I have many interacting circles, all with small overlaps but which are otherwise distinct, making it hard to use the circle functions well.  When one part of the set isn’t there, I tend to feel lost.

Further, a weakness of the circles is that I can quote anyone and repost it in a totally different circle, that may be only peripherally related to the original poster.  It has the feeling of a tool that can be abused the way high school gossip is abused, where if there is one leak, a a piece of information can show up anywhere.  As a result, I find the dislocated, too much integrated into some group without actually being integrated, following model a little weird.  Am I following, circling, sharing?  What does each post mean in terms of who sees it, and who can see it next?  What actually happens when you share something?  Despite it being a more “private” network, I actually feel more exposed than I do on Twitter or Facebook, because I don’t feel like I understand what is going on in my own mental model of the site.

All in all, while I plan to stick with it for a bit to see what happens, I think it feels awful.  And I thought Facebook is bad when it comes to privacy shenanigans (this feels worse).