I'm not outraged, but I do use it and I will need to figure out a replacement for the conversations I currently have there.

But I only have those conversations with a small number of people, so I can't argue against Google's usage conclusions.

Not outraged. I'm not that kind of guy.

But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here).

Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy posts about politics. Facebook... well, don't even mention it. It's less than a week since last time they let hackers access theirs users accounts, and even if they had a perfect security record wrt hacking, it seems they just can't stand the temptation to abuse data: change settings, do experiments on users to make them depressed, abuse 2-fator phone numbers for spamming, ask people to upload nudes - many of us couldn't make this up even if we tried..!

there's a decent sized group of people who are outraged when google shuts down any product, regardless of if they used it or had even heard about it before.

I know a lot of people in various Open Simulator related communities who are extremely unhappy about it, and are desperately searching for a replacement. Is that close enough?

I just realized this means plenty of long-form posts will poof into non-existence. Currently, the sole benefit from G+ to me is occasionally coming upon a solution to a problem, or at least a discussion, in someone's G+ blog. It so happens that the G+ crowd seems to consist of especially stubborn and strong-willed people with firm opinions, which lets the rest of us mooch off them.

Not me. But it reinforces my commitment to never get attached to any Google service.

The new GMail is also helping me with that.