So, I've had a lot of people ask me, "Why are you so hot to get off of Facebook and use this thing that only a few of my friends are on so far?"
For me, the G+ fervor is all about the fact that I was already using a ton of Google's webapps. Picasa, Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, etc, and on top of that my company uses Google Apps as well. The great thing about them is that none of them are ONLY a web app -- I can sync my calendar with my desktop calendar program or my iPhone, I can use standalone mail readers, Picasa uploads my pictures as I drop them into my pictures folder, and so on.
This is what I can't stand about Facebook "features" (photos, events, etc)-- the only way you can get at the data is to log into Facebook, and the apps are total garbage -- can you imagine trying to use Facebook events to replace your company's calendaring system or using Facebook messaging to replace your company's email? How about using Facebook Notes to replace Google Docs? Google's app suite lets me consolidate my data without restricting where and how I can use it. I can use whatever app on whatever device on whatever OS and have a full feature set and access to all of my data -- and I still have web apps that are much better than Facebook's to fall back on if need be. Even if Google HQ were to vanish tomorrow (or were to start charging for subscriptions or whatever other unlikely scenario), I have local copies of all my data. I didn't lose anything.
Of course, for many casual users, having one place to go (Facebook) where they can do everything they want to do on a computer is nice. They don't use more than one computer/device, they don't do anything more sophisticated than checking their messages and reading their feed, and as long as they can communicate with their distant family on it, they don't care. Rewind a decade and a half, and it's appealing to many users for exactly the reasons AOL popular was back then (particularly "well, all of my friends use AOL..."). AOL didn't vanish overnight, and neither will Facebook.
The only compelling feature it still has for me is a large userbase -- but in a way, that's also part of what makes it so annoying for me. The Circles feature which doesn't get talked about much (but should) is the ability not only to control who you share with, but also to filter which shared data you want to view. My Facebook feed is so jammed full of garbage (even with a couple of userscripts to attempt to clean it up) that it's a waste of time to wade through the shit to see a few good posts, so I just don't -- haven't for years. If the only thing I want to take the time to read is posts from family, close friends, or people in my profession (actually used to have to go over to Twitter to do that -- but G+ is very quickly taking over that space for me), I can do that without having to read about what some guy who lived down the street from me years ago ate for lunch.
Why not just defriend that guy then, you ask? Well, I still might want to get in touch with him some day, I don't want to lose his contact information (and again, I can't export the data in a format that's worth a shit). Also, to be honest, I just feel like an asshole when I defriend someone. I don't want to have to feel guilty about what amounts to trying to filter spam. The reason you'll never see the ability to filter your Facebook feed efficiently is simple: it's become such a marketing engine. Companies and Brands measure their dicks by the number of Likes they have, and there are thousands of "Social Media Experts" (aka Douche Nozzles) that have full time jobs doing nothing but figuring out how to get more Likes and spamming all of those people's feeds with marketing.
Google already holds the keys to the one thing in the e-world that businesses care about even more than their social media standing -- search results. I'm happy to +1 a page for a company I like to improve their search ranking, but I'm not at all interested in Liking a page so that they can spam me with bullshit. Similarly, every company's Facebook page is an unoriginal piece of shit by nature -- I don't want to go and read them for fun. When you weigh that against an actual website where the only limit on how good it can be is the talent of your web developers/designers and whether or not your company is doing anything I care about, it's obvious which one is going to be more likely to get me to become attached to your brand. As a side note for any MBA type folks that happen to read this, the fact that a website can actually generate revenue doesn't hurt either.
I know this is getting a little long winded at this point, but there are only two more things I want to cover. If you're not interested in these diatribes, just remove me from your "shit I want to read" circle and move me to the "shit I don't want to read unless I'm just trying to fill time" circle ;).
First, the myth that "Facebook has a hacker culture" is the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever heard. When your product has the worst fucking excuse for an API I have ever seen, you have zero hacker cred. I can't easily drop a god damn thing from a Facebook page into a website -- except the fucking like button. I know Google hasn't revealed their API yet, but you can at least be goddamn sure I'll be able to drop an embed into any page with a stream of a user's G+ posts with zero effort.
Finally, the "evil" factor. Yes, Google knew enough about me before I even joined to basically fill out my profile. Yes, they keep track of every other page you go to. Yes, they will mine the living shit out of that data in any way they can to make a buck. At this point, it's just a fact of life for anything social on the web, but if anyone has a history of using this information the right way, it's Google. Remember all the stink that was made over "Google is reading your email" when Gmail first launched? Well, here we are many years later, and Gmail's only ad is an unobtrusive line of text. I may not be happy about having my data mined, but one glance at Facebook reminds me it could be a whole hell of a lot worse.