I spent about a month working with Google Plus. More like three weeks really. The first couple weeks, didn't do much except observe. During that time I added about seventy people who seemed smart, knowledgeable, or otherwise talented in photography, tech, or social networking and followed their streams. As people added me to their circles, for the most part, I added them back. I also created a noteworthy number of social circles so I could kind of keep track of various G+ conversation streams, and made a few comments in some of the more interesting discussions.
The G+ user interface is uncluttered, and most of the controls are intuitive to use. The exception for this, of course, is the most important part, the account controls. I uploaded a profile picture... for those of you that actually haven't ever used a social network before, the profile picture is the first picture of you that visitors will see when they look up your profile. This should be a good picture.
The first profile picture I uploaded, didn't look very good. Neither did the second. The third ended up being just ok. I made a mental note to schedule a visit with a portrait photographer, and then tried in vain to delete the two poorer examples that I had uploaded. There were no readily apparent tools to delete photos. Not in the photos section either. It's not like I upload bad photos either, G+ automatically resized the profile photos using some mysterious (broken) algorithm resulting in some surprising results for profile images I use (and that look good) on other web fora.
The third week was the most interesting. Circle sharing was formally introduced. In this, experienced users could (if they wanted) share their circle of contacts (Who might have not desired to suddenly meet other new G+users) using a point and drag interface in the web browser. I was able to add a couple of 250 person circles (One in photography, and one composed of Non-Profit Organization G+ members). Later on I added an additional photography circle, as well as some individuals using the G+ search tools.
After this I began having problems adding other G+ member circles, and in moving members from these larger general purpose circles into smaller more well defined social circles. As it turns out, this is because of the database API.
Whenever one moves a member, adds a member, or deletes a member in a circle, this updated information is sent to the G+ cloud database. Some G+ users are being limited (or throttled if you will)... in the number of hourly or daily reads and writes they can make to the cloud database. While some G+ users are having 4,000 to 10,000 contacts added every day and they are able to arrange their circles any way they like, I was unable to change even one contact in one circle.
It didn't matter what browser I was using. I tried Opera, IE Explorer, and even Chrome. Using Chrome, I even tried to send a trouble report to Google. It crashed the first time I wrote the trouble report , just more lost time... time I don't have to lose. My second trouble report was brief and included my resignation from G+.
I like the idea of an extended social network. I'd like to be a part of such a network to help make a better world. It needs to be a network that is hassle free, where the features work as advertised, ...and not just for some of the network members.
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