THE GOOD
– I like the plus count on posts being part of the plus button. Elegant use of space.
– I like that the headlines of shared articles are larger and clearer.
– I really like the click-to-refresh, rather than the continues feed. I hate it when material scrolls off before I can get to it unless I choose to so let it.
– I like the larger image sizes available.
THE BAD
– As I've noted before, the use of popups and windows and overlays and the like makes the whole experience feel fidgety, as if I don't know what's going to happen when I move my mouse (which I have a tendency to do).
– Profile cards still pop up way too easily, and stay way too long.
– The Chrome chat function, now Hangoutified, is just plain ugly. Please, Google, don't take away my Google Talk client program, which is more attractive and more reliable even if I can't do video conferencing with it.
– It feels like less text is available in posts (before the "Read more") and in linked items. That's not good.
THE ODDLY
– Really surprised we didn't get more formatting tools. I'm not looking for anything elaborate, but clearly both a blockquote and some sort of numbering/bulleting feature would be very handy.
– The embedding of previous sidebar content (photos, suggested sites, etc.) in the middle of the stream is … weird.
– The plus count on comments has become very insignificant in size. Was that intended, or an unexpected result of the change to a different default font?
– Why are the avatar icons for post authors round, but commenters square and hangout (chat) candidates square?
– Why add the click-to-refresh and not include a clear way to identify the articles that were previously onscreen (and thus presumably read)? Especially since the location/column so easily changes as articles move downstream.
– Getting used to the multi-column format, while still trying to figure out the logic of it.
Overall I'm fine with the changes, though I didn't feel like any of them were essential. Continued room for improvement, which I suppose is a good thing.
At least things seem to be flowing semi-chronological again. Something I think the feed from Communities sort of screwed up.
I guess, +Mark Means – though I'm still having problems quite grokking the vertical-vs-horizontal sequencing.
Have you finagled with your Stream Layout yet? Having them all in a row helps a little.
The only layout choice I see is between the multi-column staggered and the single-column stream.