Martin_Ice_Web - 8:45 am on Sep 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

And hence we see the strong movement at Google to roll their own, Google+, and make it successful. They need to get the flavor and the detail of the real social networks that move buzz and communication.

Tedster, with all due respect to your knowledge but I canīt believe that you said this.
You realy believe google is doing google+ for having more singnals for serving better results? ( They did have good results and messed it up on their own ).
They do it to get more inforamtion about the users to serve better ads to the user.
In fact i donīt know why they are doing it, because fb is number one and will stay number one. Cutts said donīt try to mess with a leader in your niche, but they do?

I donīt know where are you located but we in germany do NOT use google+. Why should we. All are in fb ( 99,99 % leadership ), why should the users work on two social system?
To gather ranking information from social media is not working for germany. Poeple click on fb likes but not on g+, because they do not have any benefit from it.