New Data: Google+ Public Posts Decrease by 41% Over Past Two Months

If you think in a level or two, it's not that strange. Although Google Plus gets the buzz, it's the Profile that's the real product; Plus is just honey for the flies. The purpose of the Profile is to connect your Real Identity with your activity, specifically your social activity, and to correlate with the activities of your network of connections. So sharing posts in Reader and pictures in Picasa are social activities, and therefore interesting to Google.

As time goes on, more Google services will take on more social activity. There's Data in them thar hills! Email, by the way, is the ultimate social activity. Google knows that, because they give you 7G space just for email storage. So expect your gmail account to some day be at as much risk of loss as any other Google service, by their TOS, if you run afoul of the Real Name policy, or any other anti-social policy that they come up with.

There might be a couple reasons why your Real Name connected with yours and others' activity is interesting to Google. Either they're trying to help you have a civilized conversation with known associates in the online equivalent of a fancy coat and tie required restaurant with an assortment of mysterious cutlery and gold rimmed crystal. Or they want to make ads more valuable.

I think I hear Occam sharpening up his razor.

Even though i would be sticking with Google for now, but i commend your compilation. IMO I would go with these alternatives.

Gmail -> +1 to your idea of personal domain. Though there are other alternatives like gmx, fastmail (as you mentioned), etc

Reader -> Thunderbird is not so great, there are many other clients which are far better feed readers like FeedDemon. Even Liferea and Akgregator are good.

Calendar -> Thunderbird and if you have some money to shell out Outlook is unbeatable. Also evolution is not bad either!

Address book -> Thunderbird and Outlook

Docs -> Ms Word or Libre Writer. MS Word has been around for quite some time and is really polished. Writer on the other hand is like an untamed beast with lots of feature.

Picasa -> Flickr, or if you want to get your hands dirty, you can try zenphoto on your personal domain.

Blog -> Blogger has become relatively old and i have seen many of the old blogs migrating to either Posterous or Tumblr. Obviously one can go for their own domain with Wordpress on it.

Search -> +1 on DDG. Its awesome! It has been my primary search engine for a while now.

Are there any women on G+? Like, any at all?

Ever since Google's decision to roll it out by providing invites exclusively to old white male technology bloggers, this has been an utterly male-dominated network. Is there even one soccer mom signed up to G+ in the United States?

Hint to developers: to make a social network, you need men and women to talk to each other.

(I also agree with the comments about the Real Name policy being very destructive to usage. Facebook, regardless of what their policies say, has a HUGE number of people using pseudonyms and very little enforcement against them. Nor do people have much to lose - okay, their friends list gets chopped down if their Facebook account gets dropped, but you can rebuild most of that in an hour. Google seriously threatens a huge chunk of people's lives if they cancel your account, and having Google executives proudly talking about how all this data will be really valuable to sell as an identity platform is Not Helping.)

What about google+ hangouts ? It's new , it's fun, and maybe even radical (may make video chat popular).

It could easily be the new social: With it's currently addictive quality , plus more video content , plus social games.

But it has a few issues:

1. Scaling - it's to scale hard at the google level, maybe even hard to scale at the isp level (depending on demand).

2. High cost - it needs a different business model than the usual google adwords/data-mining models.

3. Hangouts could be a usefull asset in their fight for the tv and tablet markets. So opening it up depends on other considerations.

So maybe the current google+ is just an experiment(to test scalability and user response) and that's the reason for the limiting invite process and the lack of advertising .But when all the pieces we'll be ready they'll launch in full scale.

I see all of those things on Google+ all the time. The thing is they are all posted to specific circles and not publicly. A 41% drop in public posts is only somewhat meaningful. Of my family members that post on Google+ most of them moved from posting publicly to posting privately to specific circles once they figured out how it worked.