Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

Several days into using Google+ myself, I can say for certain that whatever the long-term impact of the suite of services will be, it is in a meaningful way a complete success. What it’s successful at is something I’m still trying to articulate, but a key aspect of it is that it just feels different. This is not for nothing. I’ve been using the Web regularly for more than 15 years now, which in Internet time is several kinds of forever.

Steven Johnson, in his (1997!) book Interface Culture – still massively relevant today – wrote that:

Conceptual turbulence – the sense of the world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand directions at once – is a deeply Modern tradition, with roots that go back hundreds of years. What differentiates our own historical moment is that a symbolic form has arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency, to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing the whole. Or, at the very least, a way of seeing its shadow, illuminated by the bright phosphor of the screen.

What Google+ has succeeded in doing is introducing a new set of shadows, with a different kind of synthesis and sense-making.

danah boyd, who’s been researching mediated sociability for almost as long as anyone, noted on Google+,

I don’t know why it entertains me to no end to surf people on a new SNS. Serious 2003 flashbacks happening here…

I concur entirely, and I know exactly why it entertains me. When done well, a new SNS is a new kind of experience – a new way of looking at other people, your connections to them, and what your social world looks like in a way that just isn’t handled particularly conceptually well in our own minds. The interface determines how we see this, and the interfaces of different SNS have done a great deal to shape their cultures. The ability to see who looked at your profile on Friendster made it addictively voyeuristic, and the restrictions on who you could see (only within three degrees) made expanding your network part of the fun. Facebook’s early walled-garden safe space made it very much a college dorm hangout, and as its interface has evolved away from its initial audience, the interface (and accompanying changes in News Feed content) have mirrored the closed-off direction of dialogue in that space.

Jim Fallows in a post on his early positive impressions of Google+ really nails the dynamics of the above transition:

The reason I hate and mistrust Facebook is its constant record of changing the privacy terms, not saying it’s done so until it’s caught, and always setting the default in the least private and most advertiser-exploitable way.

He goes on to say,

(Yes, I realize I do not exemplify FB’s ideal demographic.)

He wasn’t, at first, but it’s exactly in pursuit of Jim’s demographic – that is to say, not college students, where Facebook already had as close to 100% market share as possible, but rather post-college-age audiences with actual incomes – that Facebook has implemented the “most advertiser-exploitable” interface changes.

How would I describe the interface of Google+ so far, then? In a word: pleasant. After getting over the “half a dozen friends” hump, there’s always plenty going on, and plenty to do, but there’s very little in the way of insistence. The interface is of course very Googley – mostly white background, black sans serif for content, blue for clickable links. Everything happens very smoothly, for which Andy Herzfeld has been getting a lot of (deserved) credit. And while it’s not at all clear what it will be or do, in the long run, for now, Google+ just works – and that’s not nothing.