[meeeu]

I'm a big fan of all Google products in general. People who understand the product anticipates it and are excited about it, like Google Wave for example. But sometimes it's less about the product than the way it is presented. Waves for example was presented as the end-all, stand alone collaborative tool. But when nobody understood it enough to use it the general public doesn't care about it. In the case of Google+ it is presented as a Facebook competitor in the social networking market. Everyone and their moms are already on Facebook so why would people want to update another profile and do more work. However, the advantage of Google+ is that it is backed by the Google infrastructure, which includes the established Gmail user base. Gmail already feels like a social networking product; you can easily chat with friends and new acquaintances, share events with other with Google Calendars, and use tons of Google Apps. The point is Google already is a social network. We don't need to be confused with a new product called Google+. It's social networking features should have just been revealed as a subset of Gmail. Many are already familiar with Gmail and new social networking features will draw more people to it.

[methodin]

Google+ was never presented as a Facebook competitor. They tried social networking with Gmail with Buzz and that failed miserably. I don't really know what the problem is. The uber bar is more than sufficient.

[meeeu]

I never used Buzz. It just confused me when I saw the Buzz icon like when the 'mark as important icon' was new in Gmail. Maybe it would have worked if people can use the chat box to share content and do their status update. And then the feed can all paginate in one or more email maybe right above the first email in the inbox. People are all used to chat and checking their mail, maybe even naturally 'Buzz'. Don't really know too much about uber bar.