no worse than most networks, still in its infancy... if they can manage to not get all of the crud that plagues facebook, ie keep it simple and people buy in, it will work. They use circles vs 'groups', but once you log in, there is a place to see what others have posted, what you've posted etc... they use Picassa for photo hosting (essentially re-using existing infrastructure on their servers). It is a re-use of much of what Google does well. It also has typical google targeted ads... which I suppose you can't get away from.