Freeway or Frontage Road?

I took a look at Google+ yesterday morning before leaving for work.  For those of you who live under rocks, that's the new "Facebook killer" social network service that Google brought out a while back. Before now it's been strictly an 'invite only' service.  Even though it's still in the beta-testing phase, they finally enabled it for the general public to join without an invitation.

I "drove" it around a little, looked here and there and made my amazingly-accurate, garage sale "rapid-decision-while-the-car-is-still-rolling" assessment of it.

My impression:  Why bother?

I'm sure it's a great service and would have been top dog if they would have gotten there first, but you know what?  They didn't.  Consequently, they're doomed to play the game that Microsoft is so good at:  Wishing they would have thought of that first.  Although it popped up with lots of people that I could connect with (it used my Gmail address book during the enabling process), none of them were already using the service that I could see.

Here's an analogy for you.

Say there's a brand-new frontage road running parallel to a freeway but you can't see it because it's hidden behind a sound barrier wall.  The frontage road has had barricades blocking it from being open to anyone but "local access only" during its construction.  You drive by it every now and then, so it's fairly fresh in your mind.  For a while the freeway users were bombarded by signs and promises of what the new upcoming road will feature.  Although you're intrigued by its possibilities, you can't investigate it because you haven't been granted access.  Finally, they let you in.  You drive around, investigate it fairly thoroughly and determine that--although it really is a nice road--the freeway running alongside works great, is fast, and your GPS already has its location.  It's a road we're used to and like driving on, and all our friends drive on it too.  We see them on it every day.  What's the sense in standing on the frontage road with a big sign that says 'NOW OPEN' just to try to get people to drive on it or build houses and businesses on it?

Even though they keep monkeying with the freeway and changing the traffic flow and scenery all the time, I'm sticking with it.  The freeway works fine.

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