I hate when this sort of stuff happens in the Java world, gives me the feeling of almost "manually" parsing it, the impl could be better, if take as an example other impl as Json.net for .NET
G+ and Facebook are different things even though people do compare them.
I get different stuff in my g+ stream compared to facebook, they're targeting g+ for something more than just a social network, it is an integrator, yet another cool feature of the whole google ux.
I personally think PHP is indeed a mess as a tool, it is sort of a bunch of unorganized stuff that works. I've used it myself though, but found out other stuff like rails for example are simpler and more powerful.
so when it comes to productivity and related stuff, you might question yourself about what tools to choose, which are better and which ones suck.