The Ploogle Problem

A couple of days ago I joined the new social networking site Google+. Or: Ploogle as I alone insist on calling it.

Impressions so far have not been good

It's quite interesting but there are some very serious problems.
First of all: these guys really don't get "Privacy" as a concept and don't understand (or pretend not to understand) people's privacy concerns.
Let me give you an example everyone can find me, access my profile and see my personal information, including but not limited to email, occupation and where I live (more or less).
And while I have nothing whatsoever to hide there's a problem with that. Everyone includes the creepy guy across the street, that guy from Friday the 13 and a couple of hundred potential terrorist. Not to mention government agencies and secret Libyan security forces.
There's also been a lot of discussions about the use of pseudonyms. Why shouldn't I be allowed to call myself Captain Jack Sparrow if I want to says I. 'Aye' Says Google 'as long as you don't!'. I realize that there's a need for rules about such things but to me the real problem is impersonations not pseudonyms.
As most of you might know, this is an issue which has caused at lot of debate. Considering that G+ is a new product that Google is setting up to compete with Facebook and Tweedledee it really really shouldn't be.
(And don't tell me that theres a setting or an app for that. We need default setting and rules that doesn't enable criminals, stalkers, crooked employers and malevolent dictatorships.)
What one should expect is that Google would want to move the service to follow ist potential costumers not that they'd try to make their customer base conform to its arbitrary rules. It's not as there's no alternatives.

Rightsizing

Another problem is the sheer size of it all. The good news is that you can very quickly find and select to follow a lot of "interesting" people the bad is that then you have to listen to their meaningless plurble, watch their animated cat gifs or read their endless repetitions of the latest buzzwords. And each individual post in the stream can be huge. Often growing rapidly as comments are added.
You must un-follow the worst cases off course. But what about those who are actually quite interesting or possess essential information in some areas while being a total dork in others? What about your mother in law and all your colleagues some of whom you really don't like that much. How about the guy that works with supersizing search engine optimization software. You need to follow the white rabit but it's gone down a hole.
What we need is better ways to sort our streams, square our circles and tag our own postings. Its a well-known Internet problem: when 40.000.000 people want to talk at once it's almost impossible to hear what they are trying to say. I wonder if Google has access to technology that makes it possible to sort and systematize large amounts of information? Gee, I don't know...
You're supposed to be able to control all this through the use of circles which is an OK concept which suffers in execution. If you make your circles to big you will be flooded with ... whatever and if you make them too small there'll be considerable less of the same. My conclusion so far is that you need them to be bigger that you'll have though but smaller than you'd have wished for.
Also the tools for editing individuals circle settings are great but we really need a sorting tool that can sort, say, 500 people after language or interest in filatelism.

As it stands everybody are so exited about the ability to post messages in a constantly rolling stream of superficiality and animated gif-cats that they don't notice the train is actually going nowhere extremely fast. The whole thing is still in some sort of pre-Beta basis stasis, so you'll have to forgive and love everybody. Which is OK.
But this is supposed to be an effort towards a marketable product. Really? Get in the game mr. Gundotra!

The upside is that there 40 million users or so which means that some of them must be quite interesting.
Hopefully...