[yid]

I agree with everything you said, except the last sentence. Circles is a competent product and FB is taking it seriously, but FB will only really have competition when Circles has comparable adoption (since nothing else really matters for social networks).

[cbs]

I don't know for sure, I think that people creating plus accounts just to check it out is a serious hit in itself. From my experience and what little I can remember of the conversations I had at the time, facebook was "also check" because "everyone's on myspace, why would I use facebook?" until the moment you realizes "oh wait, everyone I care about is over here too".

For that reason, I don't think plus needs comparable penetration to compete. The critical mass needed to get a single user to switch the network they are a more active on isn't the same as the mass needed to get everyone to do so.

If I go look at my feed on facebook, I can already see the makeup of my 'top news' changing because most of the people I actually give a shit about are already on plus. Its less that 20% of my "friends", but 5 or 10 more people and everyone I care about interacting with will be there.