Indeed. I think Youtube's "Hey, you should use your real name!" nag to be a very unsettling sign of things to come. My friends @ the Googleplex also note that there was a large schism internally wrt the whole "real name" push, but that's all heresay anyway.
The author thinks G+ will be huge by the end of 2013, which is much too short a timeline... but otherwise I think his analysis is spot-on. Some highlights:
"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."
("awesome user experience" is obviously highly subjective and debatable)
"What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead."
and the conclusion:
"I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:
Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”
You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”
Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”"
The inverse of that is the Microsoft experience - I can remember a similar resentment slowly building across the late 90s. We all still used MS products, and jumped to their tune, but the underlying resentment meant that as soon as an alternative appeared (OSX for some, ipods and/or iOS for others) we jumped as quick as we could.
