Google has released it's newest iteration of a social networking competitor to Facebook…Google Plus. Despite the failure of their last attempt, Google Wave, this looks like it actually might work due to the many features within the network. Let's look at some fo them.

+Circles

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII

Cirlces allows us to put our contacts into certain groups, similar to facebook's contacts I suppose.So essentially, we only need to share the information with certain people…so if we just want to share personal stuff to family and friends, we can, then we can share work stuff with colleagues etc.

+Sparks

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRkAdTflltc

This looks like a big RSS feed of things and topic you want to share over the internet with friends. This looks pretty cool in that you can talk about topics with your circles you want to talk about.

+Hangouts

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tku1vJeuzH4

I think this one is trying to just create a place where you can just hang out when you got spare time and use video if you want. This could be pretty cool. Sort of like an instant chat like msn or yahoo messenger, but embedded into the google plus platform. Interesting.

+Instant Upload

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y_xKVSRAy8

Using a private album in the cloud, you can instantly upload pictures to your account. A bit of a gimme on that one I think.

+Huddle

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA22daAstNg

Huddle looks like you can create instant group messaging within your circles.

At this stage, Google Plus is in beta, and you can only join via invitation. To request an invite, use the link below.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleplus/

It looks like Google are going to be using this new social platform to work in conjuction with their +1 button and leveraging the power of their search engine. This was different from the Google Buzz which was only integrated into it's gmail system.As far as similarities go…check out the screenshot of the two platforms.

SCREENSHOT

Either way, this will be interesting to see what happens with the new social platform. Needless to say, Google have had a few false starts and they are going all out with this one. Is there enough room for 2 social platforms? Do we have enough time in the day?