The difference is that Google+ was actually a wonderful product.
But a couple years down the line Google did what Google does and destroyed it from the inside making it worse and worse until it was just a shell of what it started out being.
If you were into tech, the tech people were amazing. Yonatan Zunger comes to mind. He was a backend engineer at Google and the guy was great.
I also met many people who are still friends, many of whom became real life friends too.
I even got an amazing job thanks to my contacts on g+.
The feed layout was awesome. The fact that everything got fed to rss. The fact that you could tailor posts so easily. God I miss it. Only social media I've ever really been a part of.
The platform was wonderful. Intuitive, powerful, everything every other platform was not. Google started killing it slowly long before it died, but in its heyday it was amazing.
I have to admit I mostly only used it for testing purposes. I worked on a product that integrated with it, and I remember it being frustrating to work with. I forget the details of what frustrated me about it, though.