I guess there are two approaches Google uses here to at least make the notorious process of friends grouping easier and more intuitive for users. The first is of course through the UI design. The first impression I had about this wheel-shaped friend circle was "VERY NEAT." The drag and drop action's definitely quite easy and intuitive, and the visual effects made it quite a pleasant experience to place friends onto different wheels (At least must pleasant compared to Facebook's grouping feature, you couldn't drag and drop, so users have to customize the friend groups as if they are configuring their bank accounts. One detailed design feature was that users could select multiple friends and drag them all together. Grouping is one thing, to be able to easily share is another thing. That's where the newly updated black Google tool bar came into play. Once the groups are set, as long as you are browsing content under Google (e.g. viewing search results, google reader content, etc.), as shown on the left side of the image below, you could use the tool bar to conveniently share the content (also attach location, photos, files to it...), and choose the specific friend circle to share it with. It IS pretty much like a cross platform Google Buzz. So instead of going to the buzz app or gmail to share things, users could share it on the top right corner of the web page.
So how does this different from Facebook's friend grouping mechanism? As shown on the right hand side, whenever FB users post their status, by clicking on that little lock icon, they could choose among "friends", "friends and Networks", etc. If this were 5 years ago, when the concept of Network still matters, i mean when people can pretty much group their online friends by what school they went to or what company they worked for, i guess that's fine. However, as the social networks are developing into this "long tail" fashion, even within a same network, everyone of us might have different "inner circles", plus there are social circles overlapping with each other, so what people really need now is that little "customize" thing to select a specifically customized group of people to share certain information with. However, by clicking on that customize thing, users would be taken to another window (an extra step right there), AND, that's not where they could customize the group, only the place where they could choose groups... so that adds a whole layer of complexity to the user experience of grouping friends on FB, which makes it not hard to explain why people are not quite into "grouping friends" on Facebook.
So the Steam thing is pretty much just like the Facebook Wall. Not sure how folks from Facebook would feel about this, but pretty much you can find every feature in Stream matches with a feature on Facebook: "Share what's new..." = "write something"; "+1"="like", comment, share, etc. all the same, it's just on each feature, it made selectively sharing via friend circles much easier.
To be honest, I am not quite sure how far the circle thing will bring Google+ to, cause you know, sometimes, people do need that kind of "blast" feeling by posting random stuff out there, to shout out loudly to all their friends, i mean ALL their friends. Who knows what kind of surprising responses you'll have, good or bad, and that's how you establish connections with those weak social ties you have on SNS, which is exactly what's interesting about SNS, not only to maintain existing social connections, but also to potentially foster new ones. By turning Google+ into a Facebook, that also adds another interesting phenomenon, that is, users started to pay attention and customize their Google profile, which for fairly a long period of time, nobody really cares... all of a sudden, google profile becomes a place where your new friends on Google+ would use to "stalk", "research" and "learn" about you, so you might as well change a profile picture and write some good things about yourself as if you are building your Facebook info page. However, the information richness on Google profile now is far from Facebook, so that's a potential area which might attract a lot of attention if Google+ gets popular. I immediately tried to use the "hangout" feature once I got on Google+, simply because this is the first REAL unique feature about this platform (all those share, comment, grouping stuff are not new...), and this is where the hard core rocket computer science could possibly rock the stage. Basically this feature enables several people to start video chatting and text chatting at the same time. I tried this with Bill on my mac. He's on his mac too, with a webcam. The beta version wasn't stable enough for us to start the video chat, he could see my video, but I could only hear his voice though. Well, here's a video shows how it works, so now I could only imagine: An article on TechCrunch describes this as "if your neighbor is sitting there, you know that they'll likely be interested in striking up a conversation. In fact, it would be rude for you to walk by and not say anything." Is that true? Probably not. You know how high the bar is when you want to start a video chat with your friends? VERY HIGH... At least for me, unless I am chatting with my parents, I could never imagine start a video chat with a friend (doesn't really matter if this is a close friend or not... ) immediately, video chat still need you to totally put yourself together, don't have messy hair, don't be in your pajamas, don't be weirdly looking into your webcam, etc. etc. So that's exactly why text chat is way more popular than video chat among friends. The light-weighted and pressure free kind of communication is what friends need. Whereas video chat's either for families and business occasions. With all that being said, it's still a cool feature (if it actually works...), and might be useful in a different context. Only briefly looked at the Sparks feature yet, looks like Twitter's gonna be -_-!!! this time. Sparks is where people can first customize their interests, and search and share relevant information with their friends. So Twitter is more like a real-time news sharing platform, but Google is where people would go for both news and general longer lasting information. For instance, I would search for how people react to the latest SF Giant's game, but I wouldn't search on Twitter for the information on how to play baseball. You would do the later on Google, which makes Google+ a perfect place to share that less real-time but more longer lasting information.
It seems that Google+ has found this "sharing vacuum" where Google can combine its search strength with people's social sharing needs. However, I am still hesitated if the Sparks would work or not though. And the reason for that is, in order to create conversations for people based on their interests, you need not only the relevant information, but also the relavent people, which means, you are building a conversation while building this community. Twitter is successful in that it fosters thousands of communities, which might be consist of total strangers in real life, but that doesn't matter, they come together due to the same #keyword they all care about, whereas on Google+ now, one only started out with their friends, and there's no search for stranger users who might have super interesting and relevant content. It's like, no matter how much I like karaoke, no matter how much information I can find out about karaoke on Google, if none of my friends on Google+ is interested in that, I will still die from the social "loneliness" and "hunger" of not being able to find people of this interest with me...
There are other stuff on this platform that I can keep on talking, the mobile feature, the huddle feature, the linking it with Picasa, potentially with Google readers, but I am just gonna stop right now... to avoid myself putting too much preconceptions on this platform and let the users and data speak for themselves.
Of course, this is like the 3rd or even 4th attempt from Google to try to be SOCIAL. Previous ones, orkut doesn't really have a main user group in North America, Buzz is only hanging there, and wave has already disappeared. A key component to those previous "failures" is, the lack of a stable and loyal user group, which leads to the consequence of the lack of valuable content. It's the friends and the related content that ultimately drives people to use the platform. It's like my experience with Buzz, of all these time, the people who are active on Buzz are always those 5% so called "pioneer users." Again, on Google+, I saw it's that group of people are actively trying out this new "toy", but what about the tens and thousands of "critical mass" on Facebook, they were not attracted by Buzz, will they ever be attracted by Google+?
Lastly, to bring the issue to a different level: according to Gundotra, who's one of the lead designers of Google+, his vision is “Today’s web is about people. To organize the world’s data, you have to understand people” and “We think connecting with other people is a basic human need. We do it all the time in real life, but our online tools are rigid... Real life sharing is nuanced and rich. It has been hard to get that into software.” "Sharing, connecting, organizing, understanding, etc." Yes, yes, yes, they are important; but, how far away are we from the actual content creation now. Someone's gonna be the source of sharing. By sharing, I am not saying the information about where you had dinner yesterday, the photo you took on a concert, I am saying the original and valuable content that this world needs to move forward. Indeed, technology makes broadcasting to the whole world possible, it significantly reduces the time and resources people need to share information, which is good to shorten the distance between developed and undeveloped areas/fields, but not necessarily good for motivating innovation and originality. The majority of the people will be soaked and trapped by reading existing information non-stop. Should fostering the kind of seemingly social but in fact inefficient information sharing be the primary goal of the "greatest company" of this age? Probably not. Anyways, let's give Google+ sometime, to see if it'll + some surprises and more importantly + some substances to this SOCIAL age...