You've probably heard people talking about Google's new project, Google+, and wondered what it is; basically, it's just Google's latest shot at making a big impact in the social networking arena.  The company's goal is to make social neworking more like real life; according to their blog "Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it."

Many of the online services you probably already use are owned by Google - Picasa, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Earth - and plans are for all of their services to integrate with Google+ so you don't have to login to different accounts to share information.

Some of the Google+ features are:

Circles - think of it as putting people in groups so you don't have to share all information with all of your connections (you don't need to share that drunk Saturday night photo with your boss, do you?).  You can create new circles and click & drag people into circles so they only see what you want them to.

Hangouts - a video conferencing app, currently limited to 10 participants per hangout.  Google says, "hangouts are created by one person, but everyone in the hangout shares the ability to invite others. Each hangout has a specific URL. That URL can be shared as a link to invite others."

Sparks - "brings you stories on the things you love from all across the Web."  Let Sparks know the things you're interested in and it will bring you content it thinks you'll be interested in.  Don't worry if you change your mind - you can always delete interests.

Huddle - lets you text groups of people on your mobile phone at once so everybody is in the loop, effectively a group chat; makes it a lot easier to plan a night out!

Instant Upload - for Android users.  "Automatically upload your photos and videos as you take them using Instant Upload. Instant Upload uploads photos and videos you take with your phone to a private album on Google+, where it's easy for you to share them later from your phone or the web."  Just make sure you don't accidentally share those embarrassing photos with the wrong people!

Google Takeout - lets you download data from your Google+ products so you don't have to worry about losing things like photos and contacts if the service ever disappears.  Think of all the photos you might have on Facebook and nowhere else - ack!

Privacy - You'll be able to choose what information you want to be made available to specific individuals, to circles, or to everyone.  Only you can see your interests in Sparks.  Only you can see the names of your circles and who you add to them (no hurt feelings when you don't add someone to your best buds list), but you can choose for the list of all people in all circles to show on your profile.  Anyone can share a post with you, but only posts from your connections show in your news feed; to see other shared posts you would click on Incoming. You can also set who can tag you in photos and whether your photos are public.

Demo Google+

If you have a Google ID, you can check out a demo of Google+ here.

How can you get Google+?

Currently it's only available to Field Trial users that Google has invited to participate in testing, or that those invitees have in turn invited; the number of testers is limited, but if you know someone who's using Google+ ask them if they'll send you an invite.

Will you make the switch?

Facebook currently has over 750 million active users and it will be hard to get a lot of them to switch over to Google+.  On the other hand a lot of Facebook users are tired of issues like the lack of various levels of control over who can view their content.  Most of the people we know who are testing Google+ are tech geeks like us, and the vast majority of them are younger than 30.  It will be interesting to see where Google+ stands in the social networking marketplace a year from now.  Regardless, once Google+ is live to the public you'll want to make sure your website is integrated with it so visitors can easily share your content.