Google+ was announced yesterday and is currently being field tested. Scheduled to be slowly rolled out to users.

What is Google+?

It's a social sharing layer being added to Google. Their answer to Facebook, Twitter, Skype.

(scroll down for videos and demos)

I'm leaving Facebook as soon as Google+ opens — or as soon as I get an invite and can invite the people I care about.

Why

Facebook is hella boring, only a few people post more than once a day, there's a stalker mentality, endless privacy fuck ups, and over time the software has become complicated and bulky not less. The Facebook iPhone app is really badly executed from a design and usability perspective. Google+'s Sparks where they feed people interesting news based on their interests will finally give "non-broadcasters" something to talk about and share. It's like mushing Google Alerts and StumbleUpon into Facebook.

Group video is huge a pain with Skype, and there's no iPad version; the iPad compatible version is just a tiny square. Call quality is frequently terrible, and it's awkward for people to start a video conversation. Working with a distributed team and trying to keep track of everyone's hours; when they're knee deep in code, or out to lunch is reason enough to get a personal assistant. Google+'s Hangouts is like a living room in your office that's actually in your social network. People can join and leave when they're available, videoconferencing where the video being shared or person talking loudest takes center stage. It's like a really natural Sococo that doesn't force you to play with little avatars.

Twitter's character limit is irritating now and I don't want to post to 3 social networks anymore. Every social sphere is on every social network, and Facebook privacy is non-existent. So I'm just posting multiple public messages to randomly dispersed people, and a lot of overlap. Yeah, you can go to a Twitter profile and quickly see a person's updates and absorb a lot of information in a glance from a set of guaranteed-concise updates; but who does that? Yeah you can get your public updates indexed by Google but only a few, a feat not even possible on Facebook. And quite frankly I don't care about all of a person's updates. Using Google+'s Circles to target who get's a given update means fewer, and more meaningful updates — rather than forcing wordplay and brevity.

With Twitter you think about what you post more and how to word it to make it fit, but that's conformity and a focus on structure over content. What you end up seeing is the Twitter version of the people you care about. I want to see the real version. I want to see the thought they had in the moment, worded the way they talk without all these barriers, and supplemented by links; videos; and images —and I want the interface to be clean and minimalist. Twitter's custom backgrounds and colours are a huge flaw.

Twitter also goes down a lot, and only lets you access your last 3200 tweets. Both traits seem a bit ridiculous for a social network that encourages you to post every off the cuff thought.

Demo

Here's the interactive demo, make sure you hit "Take the tour" to get it started.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

Videos

Here's a link to the full Google+ playlist, just go into Fullscreen and it'll play though them all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SPF3DFB800F05F551A