Google+; it’s the exciting and hot new social network on the web. Everybody’s clamouring for invites, because the beta is taking the concept of social network in a brave new direction by making it difficult to get on. Who cares if you can’t communicate with everyone you want to? Exclusivity – That’s what it’s about these days.

Anyway, the stupid invite limiting isn’t what puts me off. My real problem with it is the interface.

Pictures speak louder than words, so I’ll just start off by putting these three screengrabs of comments I have made on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. These are all screengrabbed off my computer, running Chrome with default font size etc. They’re all cropped to the top and bottom of the post horizontal rule. Each of my posts has a couple of follow up comments by other users, the Facebook and G+ ones both have a “like” / “+1″.

(Sorry about all the blacking out, but I don’t feel it’s really my place to publish other people’s comments, even if they are just on the banality of my own eating.)

The Twitter grab spells out my problem explicitly. My desktop is 900 pixels high. When I load G+ I can see fewer posts than on either of the other two social sites. This seems very bad to me, I like to be able to quickly browse the goings on in my networks, and then interact with those that interest me. G+ makes browsing much more time consuming.

It’s a problem made worse by the inlining of images and video at their native resolutions. At least Facebook has learnt to crop and scale to keep things from taking up too much room.

If one user has posted three updates in a row, they have taken over my entire G+ screen. It feels like they are spamming me. The same three posts take up just a quarter of my Twitter feed view, so it doesn’t feel like they’re taking over.

Circles (as nice an idea as they are, and they’re certainly the main thing I hear people talking positively about) don’t help in this situation. A noisy user is a noisy user. The only thing I could do is put them in a circle by themselves, or a “7th Circle of Spam”, or something. This might be exacerbated by people not yet having worked out where G+ “fits” into their social life. Is it designed for high volume posting like Twitter, or is fewer richer posts, like Facebook?

Still, it is a worry for me that with the dozen or so people I currently have on the network, my feed is already feeling overloaded.

(And yes, I know I could send them feedback, but I’m not sure it should really be up to me to help companies make their products be something I want to use. I already have two networks that serve my needs pretty well. I can’t believe that everybody in a position to influence this at Google thought that a huge font and no theme support was the right way to go.)

Here’s an interview I did with the UK magazine & website Edge. I think it’s a bit more wafflesome than previous interviews (though at least it’s not going on and on about money!) and that’s probably down to it being a phone interview.

That said, despite having to think of what to say on the fly, I don’t think I’ve put my foot in my mouth, except for one bit.

Is making games that can be played in a lunch break any less volatile, though?

People are still going to buy Call Of Duty; [Activision has] got two million people signing up for Call Of Duty: Elite beta. But the way the industry is at the moment, the iPhone is there as an option, just like everything else. Not every TV programme is going to be The Sopranos, but not every TV programme is going to be Eastenders either. You’ve got to have a range of entertainment there. I think we went through a period – through PS2 and early this generation – where it didn’t seem that there was anything there other than shooting for triple-A and making that gamble with your money – it had to pay off.

What I had meant to say here was that there was a period where PC sales were poor, and there were no good digital distribution channels (such as XBox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Apple’s App Store, Android Marketplace, or Steam) that smaller games could be released.

Your only option was to find a publisher so that you could release a boxed console title, and that was very limiting.

Now it’s reaching a point where every boxed console game has to be a AAA gamble, so it makes a lot of sense that developers, even big ones, are looking at the many options for releasing much smaller games – much smaller gambles.