I don’t use Google+ much. It’s not that Google plus is a ghost town. No. There’s a flurry of activity from the people I follow - Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Googlers in Africa, and Robert Scoble. The decision for me boils down to one practical thing; page load speed.
I'm from South Africa. I'm not sure if they cache Google+ here (I know they cache YouTube) or use a CDN, but I've found Google+ to do exactly this. It's slow, and sometimes stuff just doesn't load (especially images).<p>It's strange, because Google+ is the first social network I've seen that actually promotes itself on my campus (large installs with lifesize Angry Birds).
I'm not in Africa, but I do have slow (dialup) internet in the US, and every G+ link is a nightmare.<p>About half the time, it just fails to load, as if there's some agressive timeout in its SSL.<p>When it does load, it shares an annoying behavior with an increasing number of sites, of displaying a white-on-white page, with only icons visible, until some stylesheet loads at the very end, at which point it can finally be read.<p>I suspect there is also javascript that times out or fails to gracefully handle failure to load some resources. I've never seen the flashy bling that people were talking about when G+ launched.<p>Oh, and as a SSL-only site, it of course defeats entirely all my local web caching.<p>To give some idea of how slow it is, I've had a single G+ page loading the entire time I typed this. Still consists of a white-on-white page.<p>I have, in some instances, needed to ssh to a fast remote server, and read G+ via w3m when there was a link I really wanted to read.<p>In contrast, when I click on a HN page, it comes up with very little discernable delay. The rare times I go to facebook, it may take it a minute to come up, but it always loads.<p>Around 5% of the US population still uses dialup.
The point about Facebook is well made. I'm glad that Facebook have taken the decision (thus far at least) not to overload their core UX with JS effects. This means that it is nearly always very easy to use FB.<p>By contrast, it always feels like it takes twice as long as it should to tweet and use G+, because the UX has been designed to be "beautiful." And I'm in Europe - I can only imagine it is an order of magnitude worse in some of Africa.
i'm currently in bolivia, and well, lets say, the internet isn't always very fast or reliable. not only is the G+ website unusable (takes ages to load, breaks in between), but also the (right hand side top) widget thingy on search and gmail does not work. it shows (again and again) some red/urgent numbers displaying that something important has happened -> click -> nothings turns up. (and if it for once works, it's not important, just another random person added me to a circle).<p>fb loads fast, works perfectly - and after i resized my pictures to 480 to 360 i can even upload them.<p>my personal opinion is, that any website/app that implements it's scrollbars via JS has to much JS.
It's not just Google+, by the way. All of Google's services are noticeably slower after they switched to the new look that Google's changing everything to. Bad move in my opinion. We don't care if the pages are very pretty, Google. We just want what we want.
In Rwanda here - can't say I notice much difference between Google+ and Facebook. The Facebook website is significantly more usable than the Facebook Android app which doesn't work at all... but I think that applies the world over.
> Maybe providing a ‘Google+ Lite’?<p>Have you tried the mobile website? Is it any better?<p><a href="http://m.google.com/app/plus" rel="nofollow">http://m.google.com/app/plus</a>
For those living in large US and European cities we take our internet speed for granted. I am assuming that it's not google to blame but rather local infrastructure?
Must say, hadn't noticed the heavy UI, but now that I think about it, a bit ridiculous that Gmail still has a loading bar.<p>Can't comment on Google Plus, I kept my account for about 2 days. Not terrible or anything, the value proposition just wasn't there for me.