tbh2347
"[I]s it as big a deal as people are making it out to be? Yes, Google+ might end up being the fastest growing website of all time, but Facebook and Twitter primed the pump."
"[U]nless you're counting Friendster and MySpace and all of those other networks that have since failed, Facebook is the pioneer in social networking; it's slower growth is understandable. The fact that it grew as fast as it did, actually, is kind of unbelievable."
First, we're just going to ignore companies that fail now? Hindsight is 20/20, MySpace was a huge competitor at the time. More importantly, I don't really see how having existing competitors in a space IMPROVES your chances of adoption. Google+ isn't "that newfangled social networking thing", it's that "new Facebook thing," and if anything the adoption effect is reversed.
What I don't get is this author's apparent agenda against Google+ - he even says "No matter how you measure it, 20 million or so visitors is a lot of visitors." so the article is really about downplaying how important 20 million is. I'm all for criticizing Google+, and it'll be interesting to see if the same exponential growth associated with social networks will occur when there's a big existing competitor. Let's just find more important things to criticize?
Saying "If you don't want it to get out, then don't put it on the Internet" is coloring things too black and white. What about those tech articles that you'd like to share, but don't want to annoy your non-technical friends with? What about the nonsensical updates that you're _okay_ with people seeing but _would rather avoid_ having certain people see?
Not everything that people post are naked pictures or incriminating evidence. There's just some things that are socially awkward to share, and that's where "control" comes in.
I'm speculating just as much as you are, but I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that a big part of Google+ is to drive usage of its other products. Once people start sharing directions, collaborating on documents, and so on G+ will be there to introduce users to one product after another. Sure, social ads may/will be important, but saying "what Google will care about is pageviews" is simplifying it immensely.
There will be the occasional embarrassing reshare, but for the most part users will (in theory...) feel more comfortable sharing more sensitive information if they better control who sees it. I found this post on technical vs social privacy interesting: https://plus.google.com/116222833568410151476/posts/QDwkrxrp...
Let's look at this a different way - you're 14, you're on the Internet. You start a hangout...to extended circles. Certain people join, and you get more "hanging out" than you had intended. And now questions are being asked. Did your parents consent to this? Where was the form that required parents to agree? Should there be restrictions on underage accounts? What kind of data should be public?
There's just a lot of legal issues, more than you'd expect. It requires a set of both design and engineering effort to get it just right. Google will get there. I hate to sound like a broken record but it's still in the feedback/reiteration stage (aka "field trial").