It's not curious that the scores are not commutative; they shouldn't be. For example, I guarantee you that pg is more interesting to me than I am to him.

Assuming you're not personal friends with pg, the "friend score" between you and pg should be low. This shouldn't be an "interest score," since presumably the goal is that Google+ users would establish strong 2-way relationships.

Everything that I am getting from trying out google+ is pointing to it being a Twitter killer not a Facebook killer; the lack of things like private messaging (yes you can post with only one person able to view it, but it's pretty unlikely that they would ever notice that you wrote it). The whole system is geared towards 'share to group' rather than 'communicate with individual x'; even the video chat is. I don't think it's correct to say that they care about strong 2-way relationships.

Isn't GMail a sufficiently powerful "private messaging" feature? You can send a message from anyone's profile if they've enabled the "Send mail" feature. Plus GMail already supports a federated protocol, so you can use this profile "send message" feature with any other mail system you want.

Maybe it's just me, but email just feels way more formal and personal. I would have no qualms writing quick one-offs like "That was fun last night, we should do it again soon" on facebook, but I would never send an email like that.

Maybe, however, Google is trying to change that. E-mail is a perfectly fine choice for the protocol for such messages, but the UI has to change. Look at what they've done in the other direction, brining Talk and Buzz logs into Gmail inboxes, for instance. Why not reverse that and export certain kinds of mails received in a Gmail account out to the Google+ UI?

I haven't tried it yet, but they say it ties in with gmail? Presumably they'll encourage the one-on-one to happen there?

I'm not entirely sure, but the ways that it ties with gmail that I can discern is that you get email notifications, and that the top bar that has the gmail, calendar, documents,... links has a little notification icon in the top right.

Haven't they pushed that off to the side with huddle?

I'm slightly surprised there's no huddle interface in the browser (or I've been too dim to find it). I know it's aimed at the text message/BBM arena, but I'd like to not have to move to a different device if someone messages me.

I don't think Facebook's core product is about communicating with individuals either.

I'm sure Google will add more features

My top two relationships are two different accounts for my brother, and they have the same score. I wonder if it knows they're the same person.

That is certainly an interesting idea.

Facebook also does this, for example by analyzing which pictures you and a friend are both tagged in. Probably there are other signals like wall posts, likes, and profile views.

You can see the result of this by the order of friends in the search box.

But Facebook doesn't expose this anyway. Google has at least shown signs that it has or will use this data (I'm thinking of the 'Did you mean Dave' or 'Did you forget Dave' feature in Gmail). Thats where the really cool stuff can happen. Especially if they let you auto-add people to Circles.

The scores seem to be in the same order as people are shown in the top-right corner, and on https://plus.google.com/circles

I only saw 5-6 different score values there, so most people are ranked the same.

I noticed the same ranking too. The people in my top 5, I speak with on Google Talk frequently.

It'd be awesome if Google+ also tried to suggest ways of organizing your friends into circles (similar to how Gmail suggests people to add to emails).

In general, I think the Circles dataset will be really interesting, as I don't think anybody else has this kind of labeled groups data. (Have people actually been separating their friends into different Circles?)

Am I the only one getting a 400 error? Based on the posts, it seems it was working only 30 minutes ago.

I removed some parameters from the request out of privacy concerns. You can see those scores if you use a tool like firebug while loading the homepage.

This seems to indicate that the score has been around for a while because it is closely tied to GMail+GChat instead of Circles usage.

Am I the only one who can't figure out how to retrieve this? Is the underscore supposed to be replaced by my user ID? In that case I get only gibberish when I wget the page.

Edit: Nevermind that, figured it out through Inspect.

Looking at the file, it strikes me that it doesn't seem to be quite what you think it is, namely a "relationship score" between Google+ users. People that I've never communicated with on Google+ but mailed previously have a score (and the people I've mailed most frequently have the highest scores), while people I've only communicated with on Google+ but never mailed don't have one (the fields are empty). Organizations that I've mailed also have scores, and they obviously don't have Google+ accounts.

It looks more like a "relationship score" for GMail that doesn't take into account Google+.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. Maybe it's due to the fact that I'm not a native English speaker, but I never meant to insinuate otherwise (after all, Google+ is very very young and the score should come from somewhere). I just wanted to share the fact that Google+ makes this score available.

Sorry for misinterpreting you. For the record, I'm not a native speaker either, which might be a source of confusion.

You need something like firebug or webkit's developer tools to get the content. If you're using Webkit: Click on the Network Tab, reload the page and wait. When it's done loading, click on XHR at the bottom. There you will see the path, and the contents.

I removed some of the parameters of the request, for safety reasons ... but if you use firebug while loading plus homepage you'll find it.

It appears that they use gmail and/or gtalk data (frequency?) as input factors; as some of my top scored friends I chat/mail with frequently but are yet not on Google+.

The annoying thing about this is that I was forced to sign up to G+ using a GMail account that I don't use for anything except Picasa. I use my Google Apps account for everything else (email, chat, contacts, etc.), but G+ doesn't support GApps accounts yet...

So the end result is that G+ really has no idea how to rank my relationships with my friends.

The same scoring data is used for the "Sort by Relevance" option on the Circles page.

My mother was #4. Zed Shaw was #7. The guy I worked on HNOfficeHours with is #1.

Not sure if this is an appropriate place to ask, but here it is anyway. If anyone has an invite, please send me one. I really dislike Facebook and want to give this a whirl.

Why do you dislike Facebook? Never understood that

I had an app with over 2 million monthly users. One day I got an email saying that one of the ad networks I was using had violated their ToS and I needed to replace them. The email said I had 3 days to do this. The cautious person I am, I turned off the ad network within 10 minutes of the email being sent.

Five minutes after I turned off the ad network, Facebook shut down my app. Users trying to visit my app saw a Facebook 404. Facebook refused to give an ETA for bringing my app back up. When it finally came back up 4 days later, its traffic was utterly crippled. Facebook never apologized or admitted any wrongdoing. They have NO respect for developers on their platform. Their platform is unstable, and if their comments at Velocity Conf 2011 are to be believed, they are proud of this fact ("we move fast and aren't afraid to break things").