I hope you realize that you can fine tune every bit of your profile to hide sensitive information (and show it to the right circles). The stalker would only be able to see that [someone] has a Google+ profile...
The goal should be that people who are being stalked, which could be anyone (and frankly will probably be me soon: I already get the occasional death threat), should be able to participate in discussions on important subjects (possibly about death threats and stalking online) /in public/ without divulging their identity. The person I responded to seems to claim that people in that situation should simply give up: that social networks are simply not an option for them. To me that is as damaging to society as claiming that people who can't see shouldn't be attempting to use a computer, as "duh: they can't see it or read anything or stuff".
Nice to see some objective reporting here - goes ahead to call Paul Allen "clearly a Google+ fanboy" and tries to relate 750 million to 1 billion.
"[I]s it as big a deal as people are making it out to be? Yes, Google+ might end up being the fastest growing website of all time, but Facebook and Twitter primed the pump."
"[U]nless you're counting Friendster and MySpace and all of those other networks that have since failed, Facebook is the pioneer in social networking; it's slower growth is understandable. The fact that it grew as fast as it did, actually, is kind of unbelievable."
First, we're just going to ignore companies that fail now? Hindsight is 20/20, MySpace was a huge competitor at the time. More importantly, I don't really see how having existing competitors in a space IMPROVES your chances of adoption. Google+ isn't "that newfangled social networking thing", it's that "new Facebook thing," and if anything the adoption effect is reversed.
What I don't get is this author's apparent agenda against Google+ - he even says "No matter how you measure it, 20 million or so visitors is a lot of visitors." so the article is really about downplaying how important 20 million is. I'm all for criticizing Google+, and it'll be interesting to see if the same exponential growth associated with social networks will occur when there's a big existing competitor. Let's just find more important things to criticize?
On the other hand, I don't understand why someone would alienate users of certain countries unless they had a reason to do so. I like to give companies benefit of the doubt when there's no hint of a conspiratorial political agenda.
Unless we're talking about different things (I'm thinking http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/), it feels completely different from jQueryUI. jQueryUI is much glossier and not as muted.
Linkbait, Zuckerberg has only opted to hide certain stats on his profile and he now no longer shows up in this top followed lists. It has been noted that Google execs have similarly done so.
People have to stop saying this. Google isn't so blind as to think every product's sole purpose is to drive pageviews.
I'm speculating just as much as you are, but I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that a big part of Google+ is to drive usage of its other products. Once people start sharing directions, collaborating on documents, and so on G+ will be there to introduce users to one product after another. Sure, social ads may/will be important, but saying "what Google will care about is pageviews" is simplifying it immensely.
That's why I prefaced it with "from a business point of view" -- to imply that it isn't the "sole purpose", but it's certainly looked at. I'm not saying that they will game the system by forcing page-views when not needed by the product, but that they will judge success based on usage, not average friend count.
