For now: G+ = FB - Farmville

I love how xkcd caputred Google+: Facebook that's not Facebook.  You could also say that G+ = FB - Farmville.  In fact G+ is a very stripped down social networking site, there's just not much there in terms of features, and I'm thinking that's by design. At least for now.

Mark Hurst points out that most Facebook "users are more concerned with the inbound than the outbound.
... The pain point for average users is the overload of incoming information". Mark doesn't think that the G+ stream does anything to improve the reading experience. But if your stream isn't clogged with a bunch of auto generated content from games, quizzes, check ins, etc then the signal to noise ration should be better right? And Mark seems to miss that you can quickly filer your stream by circle.

The stripped down nature of G+ has to be by choice. It's not like Google can't do features. Google has done the massive integration approach to social networking. When Buzz launched it was all about all the different places that you could automatically pull information from.  Almost everyone set it pull in their twitter feed, then they complained about how slow it was in posting twitter feeds and they left.  While I use and enjoy Buzz, 95% of what's there is people's twitter posts.  Also Buzz's flickr integration seems to be broken right now, so integration with a ton of third party sites is a pain to maintain.

I'm not sure how long G+ will remain the bare bones social networking site that it is today, after all FB started out as a cleaner, simpler MySpace and look where it is now.

I'd like to see better integration with other Google products like Reader. Sparks are cool but I'd like them in Reader and I'd like to share with my circles from Reader. I'd also like to be able to schedule an event from Google Calender with a circle and have people discuss it as a G+ item. And why is Huddles a separate chat program from Google Talk? Let me do a group chat with a circle in Google talk weather we're on smart phones or computers.

And yeah I'd like to auto import my blog and my flickr stream. I don't know if Google will do any of what I want.

I can do without Farmville updates, but then Google is a $100 million investor in Zynga, makers of Farmville.  So enjoy G+ = FB - Farmville while it lasts.

- Peace