Whoah, “Any future ratings, reviews, or photos will be visible on the web under the name <my name>”. “Your reviews and associated photos are displayed to [...] anyone who views places you've reviewed.”

No way to “share with precisely the right folks”? Talk about awkward online sharing. Ugh.

I wrote 198 reviews in the past but I don't feel comfortable making them public. I'd be fine with extended circles or some such. If I try to edit them, I get forced to make them public. I'm a bit disappointed.

This just looks awful.... Looking for restaurants in my city I get a list, of which I can display a whole two (!!!) on my screen at once, next to a tiny sliver of a map, because google wants to provide me a link to every service they have ever invented on the side of the screen (seriously, this is barely an exaggeration).... And within this list I get a host of useless information such as "at a glance: flavour, dining experience", "Score: overall: 15" (15 out of what?!!!), and a half of one persons text review (what good is half of one review for anyone?). Awful design. Just afwul.

And this is aside from the fact that the big 'restructure' and integration with G+ to succeed really needs me to have all of my friends using the same service, reviewing restaurants under their real names (v. unlikely).

Why don't google just focus on providing some clean and simple frontends to all that data they have. I'd love a better service to look up a decent restaurant to go to. This is very definitely not it...

I like Google and G+, but I think the appropriate place for these updates is in Google Maps. I don't know when I'll be searching for food in G+. Probably not soon.

IMO, what really needs to be updated are the Maps pages that look like this: http://goo.gl/RwKqM. Every time I land on one I just end up manually typing the restaurant's name into Yelp instead. That's extra work, but I do it. Then I'm in Yelp and I just browse around in there instead of Google Maps, so those pages pretty much actively push me to use another service.

Generally I go to yelp because clicking the restaurant's picture doesn't eject me into a random site that the picture was scraped from, the reviews seem to be more helpful, and the users all have pictures. All the blank user silhouettes on the maps pages make it feel cheap. A lot of other things could be improved too but I can't think of what specifically atm.

This interface is way too cluttered. They're showing a half-dozen arbitrary numbers per restaurant and that means absolutely nothing to me. The UX needs a lot of work and needs to get beyond this silly made-for-computers rating system.

Do they really expect me to calculate the average "cost per person" too? I know it says optional but that's absurd.

Google keeps changing the names of things that they've previously launched. Google Docs becomes Google Drive. Google Places becomes Google Plus Local (aside-- why isn't Local tied into search instead of Google+?!).

I think name changes like this are incredibly resource-consuming and confusing for users. It's interesting to note that Apple has never changed iTunes' name, even though it's way broader than "tunes" at this point.

I was wondering when Google would tie in their purchase of Zagat.

Now, if only they would save the Zagat brand by restructuring its criteria. When I saw a Zagat sticker on the outside of a KFC I almost threw up. They need to remove themselves from the fast food space entirely: http://www.zagat.com/fastfood

I've always found the Zagat "30 point" scale to be confusing

I'm surprised to see that it made the cut into Goog's interface for general consumption:

I've always thought that the Metacritic / RottenTomatoes / etc scoring system was more intuitive where they show an aggregate professional review score side-by-side with user reviews:

eg http://www.metacritic.com/movie/men-in-black-iii

This might be better if G+ had any frickin' idea where I am. None of the places listed are local.