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.

Comments

[kmusser]

The 2nd criticism is sort of odd since you can disable re-sharing with a single click. I can sort of see the first, but I think the UI is way better at doing those same things than Facebook is.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

as the article goes, they have been making changes and updates regularly, so they may have fixed that particular "bug" in the time between the author hitting it and the author publishing (or my reading/relaying of it).