Google is planning to use Google+ to mine more data about what people like, what influences people and they want to make use of that to rank websites better and find out who the authority figures are in the social media world. Google knows they have been screwing up when it comes to social media. I haven't used it a whole lot yet either but they are packing on features in it very rapidly to try and catch up with Facebook if they can.

Not at all. I got on it because of all the hypes. I now check it out only once every 2 or 3 days. Frankly, I haven't seen much value in using it yet.