I’ve been playing around with Google+ for the past couple of months and it does seem a bit geeky. One thing that comes across is that they don’t seem to be designing with what seem to be common usage scenarios in mind.The ability to share photos publicly, for example. In fact, their definition of “public” is not at all user-centred.
The scenario here is that I have a Google+ account, but lots of people I know do not have Google+ accounts (that is, I cannot circle them at least). Now I take a photo and want to show it to them, just like I might do on Flickr. But the “public” definition on G+ is “anyone with a Google account” as far as I can tell. At least, I can’t just copy/paste the URL to that photo into an email and send it round to my mates. They get a 404 not found.
Why doesn’t Google+ allow public (in the generally accepted sense) sharing of photos? At the very least, it would give them the ability to publicise G+ a bit more.