As I see it 90% of Google+'s purpose is to get users to create profiles and then these popup within Google properties in the form of picture thumbnails when the user comments or uploads stuff, etc. Which is perfectly reasonable as almost all web apps now operate around user profiles (mostly Facebook's), what I find to be unreasonable however is the seemingly heightened intolerance some pundits have developed towards G+.
Did you read the article? Most of these pundits don't hate G+, or Google's business model here, or what they're doing with social.
They hate the PR nonsense that Google's feels is neccesary to abstract away the fact that they're tiny compared to Facebook.
I do too, it feels dishonest. You don't need to post the same numbers as Facebook. No one is expecting you to. So stop lying with statistics. It's like, Do No Evil is officially gone. Maybe a few white lies here and there never hurt anyone, right?
Pundits have confused social networking with Facebook to the point where playing games or up voting articles is social networking because that's something that Facebook does. Nobody considers XBox live a social networking site, but people do the same things on Facebook and that counts.
