1) Pay us a monthly fee 2) Expect us to hound everyone and anyone whose contacts you give us In the end, neither of them are particularly attractive. G+ is kind of the hybrid lovechild of facebook and twitter. The one thing it excels at is access control, which appears to be the one thing people fuck up the most. Much like Google Search, it's an incredibly powerful platform that requires substantial google-fu in order to leverage properly. That alone will keep your mother-in-law off of it - which means it will likely become the platform of choice of the savvy. The savvy, unfortunately, have far less marketshare than the clueless Farmville players of the world.
I agree. I do enjoy the G+ access control. They did an amazing job there. I haven't checked yet, but if can't change your default stream, you should be able to. Obviously, I think there's value to a subscription model of content gathering. But even with their controls, the lack of anonymity does heavily influence my interaction. One upshot is that Google has been able to keep their ad network from becoming annoying, and I don't think FB values that as much. Can you imagine any other company with such market share being as subtle as Google with their ad network? Of course, they must be that way, but they usually don't find that line by pushing too hard.