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This article is dead on. I already have many google apps open all day and g+ will integrate with those nicely. A friend already exclaimed this morning that the google apps integration is what will kill FB (if that's even possible - myspace still has users). He then set out to move over those he actually cared about on FB to g+.

I especially like default use of groups and how it forces users to think about privacy from the get go. This is very different from my FB experience years ago and why I quit using FB.

It's a brilliant strategy, and I'd be very surprised if it doesn't lead to some antitrust litigation.
I think it's difficult to make the anti-trust case against Google.

Unlike Microsoft's control of the desktop, people choose to use Google everyday. It would be so very very easy to switch to Bing tomorrow (even easier than choosing not to use Facebook!) but people have chosen not to switch.

Just because you have a lot of marketshare doesn't mean you are a monopoly.

It's also quite easy to say that consumers will benefit from the increased competition with Facebook. This is what anti-trust tries to promote, not restrict.

Isn't most antitrust litigation started from the complains of smaller competitors? Would be tough for Facebook to argue that at this point.
The groups setup is a brilliant stab at Facebook's handling of privacy issues. I think they're going to make a push to gain ground from Facebook by saying they are taking security seriously from day 1 instead of waiting for something embarrassing to happen.
Business really seems to like Facebook. More and more I see "check us out on our Facebook page". I want to see how Google addresses the display ad advantage Facebook presently has.
That's only because there's people on Facebook.
Damn. How are these people getting invites?
G+ person zero in my social circle bought their invite on ebay for $2 this AM. He put everyone else in a circle and started posting. All those in the circle had received invites from him by the end of the day.
If your profile included some contact information, you might find an invitation appearing in your inbox.
Especially when you consider that search is also a google "app".
Am I being unrealistically impatient, or is the only feature that actually matters the feature that lets your friends sign up? Google+ is a ghost town for me right now and there's nothing I can do to change that.

It's very frustrating. I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I've got no ability to share or add friends.

I had the opposite reaction: At first only a couple of close friends were in my circles, and it felt like a true social site. Even though many of us are miles and miles apart, we were sharing, talking, hanging out and posting. All this without hundreds of relatives, coworkers, ex girlfriends silently watching us like some stalkers from the bushes.

It got even better once i realized that because of the way circles work, this kind of feeling might actually be preserved without much effort on my behalf.

I'm actually very excited about this feature. I feel like George Costanza faced with "worlds colliding" when my family, friends, and coworkers were all meeting each other on my wall.

I had to give up the site because I have to keep those lives separate for my own sanity.

Yeah, they really nailed it with Circles. That's exactly what I want out of a social network, and they've managed to implement it in a very intuitive way. I can't wait for my friends to get on it so I can finally delete my Facebook account.
Try this: Add all your friends to a circle. Share a post with that circle. They will all get email notifications, which will gradually allow them in.
Yep, this is how I invited most people in.
Looks like they are adding people in rounds. This morning I added some friends to circles trying to find out how to get them in then later in the morning all of them were added. I did the same thing again and it had appeared to stop working. Late this afternoon all of the additional people were added.

Basically add everyone you want to circles and make a post. They'll likely get through the invite within a day or less based on my current experience.

Wave failed for this reason. It's a communication tool; if the people I want to communicate with can't use it right now, I'm moving on.

The invite-only, throttled approach worked for GMail because you could use it to talk to people who aren't on GMail. Facebook's gradual launch worked because entire social networks (universities) could join at once. Wave and Google+, however, were/are worthless in closed beta.

You're one step ahead of me: I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I haven't gotten an invite yet!
I got an invite, to my google apps domain account. Can't use it.
So true. The red notification really hooks you back in.

It's because Google+'s social signal to noise ratio is so much higher than Facebook. I dread the red notifications in FB's upper left corner bc they're usually from some friend of friend's irrelevant spam event/survey/tagging etc. Google+ Circles really filters thats out.

Facebook's mistake was introducing Groups so late. With Circles, users can create Circles AS friends join. I will never retroactively organize my Facebook "friends" into Groups. I will, however, take a little time each day as new REAL friends come to Google+ to organize them to reflect real social structure.

Google 1. Facebook 0.

You are actually kind of forced to think about it. If you want to 'follow' someone you can only do so by adding him to one or more of your circles. Of course, you can throw all people in the "Friends" circle, but I think given this visible choice not many will do that.
This is actually a misfeature -- it's hard enough to avoid procrastinating without having to summon the super-human willpower necessary to avoid clicking your notifications every time you do a simple search.
It's a misfeature if you are trying to actually get work done, but in my experience people aren't exactly going to use a different search engine so that they can avoid seeing something that they want to see. They are going to use the same one and complain "why do I have friends!" while reading their messages and procrastinating on their work.
I think you're spot on - Facebook is basically an entertainment destination. If google is trying to become the same thing, they may end up making the search experience worse.

That said, it's not like there's a choice.

I love Google+ so far, but I think this notification in all google sites is overkill. I'll be one of those looking for ways to disable that notification area.
I wonder how companies will view this, too - if they block Facebook to keep employees from wasting time, what now?
I think Google's real goal with + is to fight Facebook in social searching.

The fact that it's a different form of social network (more refined imho) and has new features (hangouts, circles) is bonus.

Google's bottom-line success with + will be the mitigation of the Facebook social search threat... anything else is gravy.

Circles isn't really new. It's definitely implemented better (exposed and integrated), but it suffers from what I think is a serious weakness: hidden complexity. When you think about it as a broadcast, it's very simple and straightforward, but when someone in one of your Circles starts commenting/talking back, it gets a lot more complicated.

More thorough explanation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714333

I agree. I love the idea of social searching, but when Facebook and Bing partnered up I was a little disappointed. I don't like Bing at all and have even made a conscious effort to force myself to like it, but just couldn't get in to it.
Shameless Plug: I just wrote a chrome extension that adds that little red notifications box to the browser, so the persistence of Google+ is unavoidable :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2716053
Funny, I did the opposite. I wrote a little chrome extension that hides the little red notification from the google toolbar so it won't bug you at all: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ogcfegjiehdakiogch...
The black bar at the top of Google can be extremely distracting when I try to do work-related searches. I think their core product can suffer if they try to make this a game dashboard, bombarding users with these notifications.
The reason I think Google+ has a good shot at being successful boils down to the fact that its simply a better product. Not to disparage facebook and all the brilliant people working there, but the fact remains that it was first started by a few people out of a college dorm partly on a whim.

On the other hand, google+ has the might of one of the web's most powerful and innovative companies investing tons of R&D into the psychology and science of human friendships behind it. The fruits of all this research are plain to see in everything from the way it maintains circles to the implementation of hangouts. Ultimately, its just a better product. Not that it guarantees success, but it does a good chance at it.

I am getting tired of reading all about it and not being able to actually just use it :/
I still think this is too little too late especially if Google+ is aimed at people under 30, most of that crowd is mobile and smartphones seem to be the way everyone in that group prefers to communicate not sitting at their desktop computers.

Maybe Baby Boomers will like it over Facebook or not at all for either, if it's aimed at a younger crowd I can't see it working unless as stated it's forced upon people.

With iPads and other tablets and mobile devices becoming more powerful with bigger and better screens I think a stripped down mobile social network app would be the best way to attract attention or a completely different concept.

Both the Android app and the mobile html version of Google+ look really good, so I'm not too sure this is too little too late from Google in that regard.
How about social search? Sparks has a huge potential, doesn't it? Facebook's greatest strength is its huge social graph. However, they still didn't create a really valuable social search.

Facebook can easily mimic google circles. But, who will be better at combining search and social to add some new value to both?

And hangouts? It could be quite hard for someone to make a good implementation, and still have a huge user base as google.

Anyway, circles seems like the easiest feature to implement for the likes of facebook. Good social search, and group video chat, this might be more difficult (facebooks classic chat isn't even working most of the time).

I wouldn't be surprised to see a really basic version of Office 365 integrated into Facebook as a response to this. There's already an experiment of sorts at http://docs.com
So if you're Microsoft in 1999, you bake it into Windows.

If you're Google in 2011, you bake it into search.

All you do is make your core product heavier. The thing you wanted to kill doesn't go anywhere. It hardly notices what you did: http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/28/googleYawn.html

The other trump card: Chrome. Bake the Google bar in and Facebook is in a world of hurt.
Duh. Click around Google after being in Google+. Your full account loads into the interface, it's very apparent that Google+ is the "next version of Google". I assume that eventually the "+" moniker will be dropped and it will simply be "Share with your Google Circle", etc. They say they're integrating it into their products... I think it's the other way around.

Look at how Gmail contacts are treated in Google+, they're relegated to a stopgap. Look at the privacy settings for various fields in your profile - they default to sharing with your Gmail Contacts and once you chose a circle, you never have any context of Gmail Contacts anymore.

I love unification and data aggregation, especially with Google's Data Liberation efforts and the export they already have for taking your social data (potentially elsewhere).

The context with Gmail is exactly what got them in trouble with Buzz. People think of e-mail as a very private tool, as opposed to a social network where things are not exactly private.
Add to that the frustration that the thousands of facebook developers feel with the never ending changes and broken documentation. Btw, i believe Zynga is tied to facebook via some agreement. I d really like to know more about google's plans about its platform.
I 've just had an interesting discussion with a colleague who feels extremely annoyed when she sees the black social bar when she searches on google. She is now logging out of gmail when searching on google. I fear this may cause a major backlash over privacy, and it would be better for google to make it easy to turn off social features for search.
Too bad Google sucks. Otherwise their service might be considered.

As it is, I can't wait for it to die like Google Wave. More worthless web apps from Google will come to fill its place.

Could you elaborate on why you feel Google sucks?