"G+ is certainly a means to and end for Google. They don't need to beat Facebook. Instead, Google simply needs to have their own stream of social data and attach that to an identity that then allows them to map authorship of content throughout the web.  In doing so, they join web of people with the web of documents.  I still believe in the algorithm but the vast acceleration of web documents and their own ability to digest them (via Caffeine) has provided new challenges. I see the potential of AuthorRank as a way to efficiently allocate their resources.  It's not that Google won't analyze and process all of the documents, they just might start with and give more importance to those that have positive authorship attributes." - AJ Kohn