[billybob]

Seems like the idea behind "Circles" is that it can be both.

"Sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."

[swix]

Yeah, I mean I certainly hope so, I am kind of tired of facebook, Google+ feels right. It's sort of like when everyone had hotmail, then everyone switched to gmail.

What was gmail that hotmail wasnt or didnt have? Well no spam... clean interface, did I say no spam? ;) and some more of those goodies, one can hope this may be something similar.

[hugh3]

If I have just one criticism of google+ so far, it's that the look-and-feel is just a bit too white and sterile at the moment. It feels like hanging out with your friends in a hospital waiting room.

Of course that's partially just that there's not much going on there yet, compared to facebook... but the other part is a page design issue. Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere.

Aside from that, the "Circles" feature is precisely the right functionality. Why yes, I would love to be able to sort my "friends" into "people I've met at least twice" vs "people I actually like" vs "people I actually like who also live locally" and so forth.

edit: Oh, and one other major criticism: it's picky about browser, and won't work on either of my work machines. I can understand it not liking the Firefox 2.0.0.12pre that I have on my desktop machine, but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?

On the other hand, that could be a feature too. If facebook didn't work on my work machine I'd probably be more productive.

[commandar]

>Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere.

On the other hand, I really love the page design of Plus because it's nowhere near as claustrophobic as Facebook. The larger fonts and increased whitespace make me tend to slow down and read more carefully whereas I have a tendency to simply skim over Facebook posts as quickly as possible. I definitely appreciate the large photo thumbnails, too.

I don't know, it's kind of hard to put my finger on, but I'd almost say the layout feels more relaxed to me.

FWIW, Andy Hertzfeld was the UI lead on the whole project.[1]

>but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?

FF5 was just released and FF4 won't be receiving any future updates, security or otherwise. Not supporting older versions seems in line with Google's rapid iteration approach.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld