Google+, Google’s social network, has arrived

After announcing the new product Google+1, today from Mountain View comes a more articulated and defined social project: Google+ (forbidden to call it “Google plus” because the correct name is “Google Plus”) stands on the horizon as a structured competitor to Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networking.
Google+, currently only available by invitation, allows registered users to form groups called Circles“. We had already spoken about the first rumors circulating around the Circles project, but today everything is starting to become clearer.
Each circle” will convey shares, status updates, and “Likes” only to group members and not to a generalized external audience.
Regarding the sharing of personal content (like photos or videos), Google+ allows you to upload multimedia material to the cloud, all automatically – if explicitly desired – especially when it comes to Android devices.
Moreover, your own feed of followed content can easily be found on your profile, thus being shareable.
To show interest in something, something very similar to Facebook’s “Like” has been established: it’s called Sparks” and performs the same function.
To communicate more easily with your contacts, Google is deploying the “Hangouts” function: by participating, a multiple video conference will be activated. This even trumps Skype, at this point!
Despite the obvious similarities with Facebook’s mechanisms (after all, what else can be invented at the moment in the realm of 2.0 sociality?), it seems that the differentiating factor Google wants to emphasize is privacy, which is heavily criticized for being scarce on Facebook (provided you adjust personal settings accordingly), and is at the heart of the Circles” concept according toGoogle.
On paper, Google+ seems like a more substantial and accomplished attempt at a social network: it’s impossible not to remember that Google has disappointing experiences with social networks behind it. Both Google Buzz and Google Wave failed to distinguish themselves and therefore did not gain traction.
Will Google+ succeed, then? Will Google+ users be
defectors from Facebook, or will they be entirely new users? Can the two social networks coexist in users’ online social habits?While we wait to find out, here are a couple of promotional videos for the Google+ project.