Have you never seen a web site that uses a fixed width layout before?

I have seen fixed width websites before. But there was some design element (and good reasoning behind it) to justify it. For the most part these kind of websites make sure you can just ignore the white space.

But on google+, when they have a column on the extreme right (for chat), you can not ignore the damn white space. It is always there. It just looks a design push that had not been taught out completely.