hmm, I have to disagree there, firefox is not superior to chrome. Chrome is fast and simple and crashes way less then firefox, especially on older model computers.

@Kingdroid if you don't already know, you can delete the &theater in the address bar to remove the picture pop up, one of the F keys does the same thing F6 maybe.

One plus for Google+ so far is I'm not seeing the "Facebook ad banner" on the right side of every page reminding me of products I don't want.

Myspace versus Facebook....Facebook vs Google+....not a good comparison. Ever look at a MySpace page? Myspace was full of personalized, idiotic nonsense that mostly made pages annoying to look at and almost uninteligible. In a sense, MySpace gave *too much* freedom to the user, because most 13 year olds don't have the ability to make a visually pleasing web page....

Facebook has also captured an unimaginably larger audience than MySpace, and spans age and gender boundaries. NO comparison to MySpace.

Anology....Commodore came out with a *fantastic* computer...the Amiga...when they were flopping about like a dying fish on the pier. It was too late, because Apple and IBm had already claimed too large an audience. By the time they released the Amiga, it was too late. So...in the social networking realm, how is Google (a *really* good comapny, but a late comer to social medai) going to beat FB (Apple/IBm)? what is the new and unique gimic? that is what I have not heard answered at all.

@jmo: FF4 beats Chrome in most speed tests, I believe. Even running the 8.0 triple-beta, I never have it crash (plugins are the cause of most crashes). And FF is about 2-3x as space efficient as chrome.

The Facebook Ad Banner...does not impede upon the usability of Facebook *at all*...and, please, let's NOT pretend that Google isn't a commercial enterprise!!! lol But that FB ad banner can be criticized by users (I hate this ad....don't show me any more like it), and can be targeted to audiences (age, gender, local...) making the advertisements more useful. *IF* I am going to be subjected to ads (and I will....especially on Google...) then they at least ought to be relevant to me. Or, easy to ignore (always on the right hand side of the page...) I hae no problem with FB ads.

As someone who was using social media well before twitter and myspace, I can tell you the evolutions of it and google+ is the next step. The privacy setup is far better than facebook, and it'll remove the spam of the applications and garbage that has turned facebook into myspace.

@Abge, check for my name. Go ahead any put me in a circle and I'll return the favor... in fact, I may just put you in a circle right now :)

@fortknox

Done.

@ : )

Do you really believe it's one of the worst products? What don't you like about it? For email, I think it's fantastic. And yes, I do like being able to chat and look at email in the same window. I can understand why someone may not like that, but I don't see why having the option is bad.

@krellin

I suppose time will tell. Clearly, if no one joins it then I will stop using it; a social networking site is only good if people are on it. And, quite frankly, I don't care if people over 30 switch or not, because those aren't the people I communicate with over the internet anyway. I'm also not saying that FB is terrible, what I am saying is that I find G+ to be a better experience.

@abge: It's not so much that it's a bad e-mail client. As e-mail clients go, they're all pretty terrible. I mean, god awful. I wouldn't use a cloud based e-mail account if you paid me. It's just that Outlook 2010 blows Gmail so clearly out of the water that Gmail's existence is laughable.

Wow so many Google haters here.

I'm loving Google+. Not because its better than facebook, but because of the more professional nature of what it allows. This is the working man's social network. We're already using Google Apps, with Plus letting us use those better, its a win win.

I really hope that it doesn't become the new facebook. I'd like to keep all the children on facebook and let Google+ become what Google Wave should have been.

You can add me at: lytle.zack at gmail. And if anyone wants an invite, let this thread know.

Picasa is awesome. Gmail is awesome. Docs is awesome. Reader is awesome.
All Google+ does is let you use these awesome things with the people you're already using them with more easily.

And before someone links me to an alternative to any google product: It doesn't matter. Google Apps is an enterprise accepting suite of applications. No one wants 7 different applications made by 7 different companies. They want them all to sync out of the box.

As an IT professional and a software developer, nothing beats Google Apps, including Google+.

@smile
Outlook and Gmail do not offer the same services and are not comparable products.

lol Geo, you aren't actually claiming that Google is the only thing out there synch all your apps, are you? For that matter, name even 2% of the population that uses more than 2 apps! Besides...Google..."We owns your data, bitch!"... isn't **ever** going to be the central repository for my intellectual property! An IT pro ought to consider that.

You've clearly never been a Google Business customer.

If I jsut refresh it gets rid of the popup too. I want it to do it automatically.

Kingdroid. Download something called Facebook Minimalist.
http://lifehacker.com/5616119/minimalist-facebook-cleans-up-facebooks-interface

You'll never see the theatre mode again.

Cannot help but post this:

http://i.imgur.com/kRkOR.jpg

http://tinyurl.com/6c69wuz

Google+ is just like Facebook. Just done better. And so far no farmville.
Which is nice.

I disagree. I agree. I agree.
Google+ is not just a better Facebook. It serves purposes that Facebook never can or could have.

thanks geo.

Here's what I like:
I use twitter to post funny things.
I use another twitter account to deal with work stuff.
I use facebook to connect with family.
I try to use facebook for work, too.
I use tumblr for personal stuff.

Here's the problem. Different sharing for different audiences. And that is EXACTLY the problem that G+ solves.
I keep work, family, online audiences completely separate in both my POSTS and my READS. It's the perfect social answer for people like me.

tl;dr for this wall of text is that Google+ is better than its competition because the interface is clean and simple and effective, even if it suffers from some integration bugs.

Myspace and Facebook are so completely full of spam that I can't stand to use either site. Google+ is clean and simple. It doesn't have all of the ridiculous personalized pages that look like the horrors of 1995, and it doesn't fill my screen with hosts of notifications about quizzes and other remarkably stupid "apps". The limited advertisements don't really bother me; it's the actual *content* of Facebook that is painful to experience. Google+ doesn't let people post on my wall, either. Every person has a stream that they fill with their personal information, and just like tagging in dwm, I can choose to view your stream when I feel like it. On Facebook, I either need to constantly mute or unmute people and posts when I want to interact with them, and it gets messy even in the first day of use.

To be clear, I enjoyed Facebook when it started. The only odd feature it had was the "poke", which wasn't even all that annoying. Google+ is like the original Facebook, but with good permissions control. The important privacy note isn't that Google has my information, but that I can control which of my communications are visible to a specific subset of my contacts.

If you're actually concerned about privacy, you really shouldn't be putting your data in someone else's storage in the first place. This includes sending email anywhere for any reason using any service. Sure, GMail keeps all of your data on Google's servers, but even if you run your own POP and SMTP servers, every message you send gets bounced around at least half a dozen times through major SMTP gateways, all of which store every message that passes through (for legal reasons). There never has been anything really private about email, and GMail doesn't stand to change that. (Where the comparison to Outlook 2010 came from is beyond me. I use it at work, and it's a complete disaster of an interface.) Facebook also routinely sells your "private" data because it's a great source of revenue. At least Google restricts their privacy invasions to automatic text-processing services.