on Google+

[acroyear]

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus - O'Reilly Radar:

In general, the UI makes it hard to find the stuff I care about. What do I care about? I want to see new things from my friends, I want to see replies to things I've written, I want to monitor comment threads I'm a part of, I want to see the stuff my friends like, and I don't want to see the same stuff again and again. The Google Plus UI mushes all these into a few overlapping streams such that I see the same threads again and again yet can't find the categories of things I do care about. I think they hope that machine learning will promote relevant items to the top, but the results so far do not make me confident that they can deliver a useful service on this approach. My experience is one of noisy irrelevance.

Currently, Facebook and Twitter both offer a more functional user interface to social activity.

but earlier the author wrote this caveat about security within your "circles"

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus - O'Reilly Radar:

The problems arose when I started to use the circles. If I post something to a circle (e.g., kid pictures to "Family"), someone can reshare that outside the original circle with two clicks. There has, of course, been considerable debate about whether this is a good thing (after all, some say, they could just copy and paste the picture anyway), but I come down firmly against it. If I'm using circles for privacy, I don't want items to be reshared. Just being able to see my photo doesn't make you the administrator of it.

It should be said that facebook *kinda* has this problem but generally the original photo can be locked down so that though the person shared it, it *supposedly* can't be seen by any who couldn't see it in the original security model. I have, however, never tested that feature to see if it really works.