14 DAY TRIAL // No big surprise here, but Google is promising changes to Google+, to address some of the top concerns and criticism. Vic Gundotra, Google's head of social and the one in charge of Google+, wrote that the company is listening to all of the complaints and will be making changes to address them.
While he didn't provide any more details, he did say that some changes will be going live as soon as this week.
"Lots of criticism for Google+. We are listening and working to address. Stay tuned for changes this week," Gundotra wrote on Google+.
The post has already gotten hundreds of comments with people illustrating some of the things they find frustrating with Google+ or which could be improved.
Unsurprisingly, many of the comments, on the post and elsewhere, focus on the Circles mechanism. The new system for grouping friends, acquaintances, work colleagues and so on, is original and has plenty of advantages, but it also has some weak points.
Some complain that it may still be too complicated for most people to be tasked with grouping their friends.
The circle creation interface, while praised for its innovative and intuitive design, becomes unnecessarily tedious if you have hundreds of Gmail contacts.
On the other hand, many other users want more ways of managing their contacts with circles, like sub-circles or the ability to merge two previously created ones.
There are also issues with sharing. The Google+ hybrid model of not requiring two users to 'friend' each other, similar to Twitter's, makes it possible to set up a profile more geared towards publishing to an audience rather than engaging with friends.
But you can do the latter as well and there's no way to separate the two roles, all of your friends may get your updates on photography, or music or whatever interest you have, even though they may not really care about them.
Google+ is still in the early beta phase, while it's growing fast and Google is allowing more people in, there are still plenty of things to be sorted out. At the rate the site is growing though, it better move fast.