Google+ was never presented as a Facebook competitor. They tried social networking with Gmail with Buzz and that failed miserably. I don't really know what the problem is. The uber bar is more than sufficient.
I never used Buzz. It just confused me when I saw the Buzz icon like when the 'mark as important icon' was new in Gmail. Maybe it would have worked if people can use the chat box to share content and do their status update. And then the feed can all paginate in one or more email maybe right above the first email in the inbox. People are all used to chat and checking their mail, maybe even naturally 'Buzz'. Don't really know too much about uber bar.
