My status updates have gone from about 1/day a couple of years ago, to about 1/week now. Even though I've blocked all apps, etc., I find FB to be too noisy. The only thing I like about FB is that I can keep track of friends' events, like babies, marriages, breakups, trips, etc.
I found the Google+ "what's hot" feed interesting too, until they went through yet another redesign and I couldn't find it anymore. I didn't have enough interest to ask the Internet how to find it again, so I slowly just forgot about it. Now I don't felt like I've lost any utility from not giving it three minutes of my time every day.
Unless you disabled it there are hot posts every half dozen posts in your home stream. The hot stream itself has it's own link in the left hand sidebar called explorer.
Funny anecdote: I wrote a GM script a loong time ago to block the FB ads. And promptly forgot about it.
So I was a bit confused when people would mention FB ads, and I was like: where are you people seeing these ads? This confusion reigned for a long time until recently, when one day I opened up my GM userscript manager panel and saw the FB ad blocker. Oops! So, for me, ads are not an issue (so far).
Part of it is certainly the novelty factor. You can only be "paired" with exactly 1 other person.
Part of it (for me), is that communications with my wife are via a separate stack, separate notifications that are easier to manage, and the ability to share more than you can in MMS (a silly sketch, or a map location).
Pair cuts out all the "noise" of other systems and gives you something that makes you feel like communications with that one other person are something more unique and "out of band" than all your other notification streams.
Personally, I haven't figured out if Pair is a product or a feature, but that doesn't really matter to me right now.
Not too much, but it makes people feel nice by having an app that they know is shared with one other person. All the features within it can be replicated by using a combination of other apps(Draw Something, SMS, some kind of social-shared to-do list, etc.) but Pair brings it together nicely. The last girl I dated and I used it, and it was silly fun.
