In only a few weeks, my use of Google+ is rapidly reducing :-( I really like Google+, and I'd like to use it more, but there are some real issues that make it less worthwhile for me to use than, say Twitter/Email/SMS/etc.

• No Google Apps support
  • The more I post here, the more I'll lose when I Google Apps is supported
  • All of my photos are already on my Apps account (Picasa), which I paid to upgrade storage space for
  • Most of my family don't use Google+ because they don't want "another" account, and I don't want to "support" them getting confused with the two, especially with the login issues Google has since "transitioning"
  • (Google "transitioned" all of our accounts so we can no longer login to both at the same time to "fix" the fact that Google Apps always lagged behind, yet seemingly this isn't fixed at all. Why did they bother?)
• No native iPad app
  • 95% of my time spent on social media is on my iPad, away from home, or on the sofa with the PC off
  • The mobile web app doesn't support things like Huddles or Push Notifications
• No keeping track of what I've read
  • This makes it impossible to just "dip in" and read a few posts, because you end up with read posts/unread posts/read posts in your stream
  • I want to read chronologically
  • I want to read everything from my close friends/family. The current interface just doesn't support this
  • (Almost every Twitter client supports this basic functionality, why don't Google think it's important?)
• No ability to control which circles appear in my main stream
  • My stream gets flooded with semi-interesting people that I have in circles so I can read their posts when I have "extra time", or that I have in circles so I can easily share with them. Eg. I have many non-native English speakers in a circle to keep track of who's helping translate G+ Notifier. Some of them always post in their native language, which isn't really useful to me.
  • (Ironically, Twitter lists solve this problem perfectly, because I can read what those people post when I have extra time, and otherwise keep up with people I follow in my main timeline)
• Share spam
  • I follow a lot of Google employees and when something new is launched, my stream _fills_ with everyone sharing the same post

The first three are pretty much deal-breakers for me. Currently Google+ just feels like a naff copy of Facebook, though almost everyone I know is on Facebook and only a fraction are on Google+. Google+ doesn't seem to offer any functionality aimed at eating away at Twitter.

It's a shame. There is so much potential in Google+, but I think it launched way too early, and Google aren't talking enough to the users. They should have something like Moderator/UserVoice/etc. rather than taking feedback secretly. It would be nice to know whether Google agree with feedback we've raised and it might be implemented, or if they've decided it's not the direction they'd like to take the product in - at least then we wouldn't sit around "waiting".

While clicking through Google Webmaster Tools recently, I noticed an interesting performance chart. It looks like since January, the performance of this blog has gone down the crapper. I've made zero code changes that could account for this, so my assumption is that it must be something on App Engine. Interestingly, around the start of January, Google App Engine rolled out the High Replication Datastore option, so I wonder if this may be related.

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 14.3 seconds to load (updated on Feb 19, 2011). This is slower than 98% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times

Sounds a bit pants, eh? :(

Strangely, the app is responding very quickly here, so it's possible the issue is only affecting GoogleBot. Either way, something appears to have changed, somewhere!

After a week of downtime, things are back up and running. I can't explain why it takes so long to close a Google Apps acount (5 days advertised, but took longer), but I'm happy things are back up and running (for one, this domain is used for as my OpenID identifier and I couldn't login to many services!).

Thanks to Google for finally sorting it - but should it really be this difficult? There's definitely some room for improvement...