I refreshed the page, loaded the new design, and felt like the information density instantly dropped in half. I'm not sure if they think I'm going blind or forgetting how to read.

Text went away. Pictures and icons appeared.

The thumbnail pictures of the people in my chat list got bigger, their names stayed the same size, and all indication of their online/offline/idle status completely vanished. And half the people I talk to regularly disappeared from the chat list. A lot of my friends were perma-invisible, and not it won't let me see them. Great.

I feel like they want me to scroll through the news feed like I'm reading a glossy magazine full of pictures, but I don't want that -- I want text.

I had hoped that changing to the one-column layout would make things better, but all the posts feel like they have a width of less than 80 characters.

I'm going to delete my facebook account after this g+ update.

I've seen a couple other people say that as well.

I was actually thinking the opposite.

Clean. I like it. I don't like animation effects for everything, it reminds me the first days on OS X. And regarding quiting Facebook: I did it but I quickly came back again since I have like 30 services associated just with FB account and they don't provide Google+

well, actually the design is more clean, crisp and fluid. The burst of information in social media has let the sites to concentrate their design on news feed and presenting information in the most suitable way. the trend of minimalism is a very good approach of Google and I think that soon all social media sites use minimalism as their theme during layout design, the concept"less is more" has worked for many sites with huge information, text or picture such as Behance or Google and certainly will work for more.