Google's Plus Venture into Social Networking

After a long hiatus following a catastropic failure of Orkut, Buzz and Wave, the next big leap of Google into Social Networking is Google Plus. At the outset it looks appealing and promising competitor to Facebook but is it really going to stay for a long time?

A few observations on Google Plus are:

1. Pluses:
   
   1. The biggest head-ache of Orkut and Facebook Spam-source 'Who visited your profile?' is not there at least till now. Good.
   2. Glad that Google Plus is a single sign-on participant so that I can switch between multiple Google Accounts with ease.
   3. Unlike the debutant voice chat of Facebook-Skype venture which works only on Windows, the hangout feature seems to be less resource-intensive and cross-platform too.
2. Cons:
   
   1. Strong security lapse. Any one seems to be able to barge into your network. Facebook initiates a friend request and you need to confirm them before letting them in. This seems to be allowing the users directly. I admit that this is not a major problem since currently whatever is going is just a limited use field trial but I would have appreciated Google Plus team if they could have brought in security right at the kernel level.
   2. Lack of profile visibility controls like in Facebook.

These are a first few observations on Google Plus. Let me tour around more and keep updating this list.