What's going to be interesting is when people start to recognize Google+ isn't just the obvious. It's that it can replace email and instant messaging, a host of other technologies, as well as content management systems for collaboration. Google Wave was a bit ahead of it's time, and not everyone really understood it. What it said was "People produce content and those that are interested are responsible for consuming it". Google+ has the chance to take a lot of what's become familiar and allow that idea (Wave) to run. In a practical example:
A creative group is working on a new design for a sneaker logo. But, they're a small part of a large company. So, they start a wave/Circle. Each time any person has an idea, they share it to the Circle or update the Wave. Specifically, they create a wave just for the members of this project, since it won't require all of the creative team members. If you join the project, you join the Circle. No email groups. No "looping in" of people. The fire hose of over-communication is turned off and becomes the cool stream you touch your lips to instead.
There's no version control apparent to the users for documents added this way, they just flow. It is the responsibility of the Wave/Circle members to consume the content and search for what they need to know. This is collaboration: Sharing, consuming, and relying on yourself for referential connections (memory). It demands people be more responsible, not less responsible. It also creates honesty which in turn builds trust.
In this large company, there's also an HR group. The creative group is a member of that Circle/Wave too and gets HR updates. Some of the members are also members of the Management Circle/Wave. And so on.
What Google+ does, and what Google Wave did was create social streams of data. They took the best of Twitter and the simple social aspect of Facebook and made it the steering wheel of their impressive collection of apps.
We entered an age of commodity hardware a long time ago. We entered the age of agnostic applications around the same time. Why shouldn't we become protocol-interpreter agnostic too? Do we need Outlook or Mail to read email messages from an IMAP or POP server? Do we need POP or IMAP? Why can't we exchange information in a new way? Seinfeld says: And what's with exchanging anyway? Shouldn't we share our information with people and let them share back? None of this point-to-point email or IM garbage but true, open, communication? As in the example above, the knowledge shared is no longer in buckets scattered throughout a warehouse. The knowledge is now a web. It is a level of abstraction, or maybe more accurately coherence, beyond text or attachements. It is an interaction.
Google is allowing technology to be what it can be and allowing communication to make a dramatic leap forward. Adoption is going to be important. What is more important than their initial subscriber numbers are going to be the sustained interactions of those subscribers (participants or whatever). Getting that +1 everywhere is in their interest. But more so, it is in the interest of content creators. A Facebook elitist Like is one thing. A ubiquitous + allowing collaboration in a Google Doc, a Spreadsheet, a Drawing, is quite another.
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