Recently Google unveiled its latest attempt to compete big time in the social networking space – The Google+ Project. Google+ is available only to a limited number of people inside Google itself for field testing. They are working it out to bring it out like a beta form and then when they feel its good enough, everyone will get a chance to know if this is going to be the Facebook Killer.

Like how Google started with GMail as an invite only system, you need to get a Google+ Invite to join. On first look at the videos that Google released on the Google+ user interface, it looks very different from the previous attempts of Google in the social networking space. The main reason why Google Buzz didn’t take off is because it annoyed people by assuming all their GMail contacts as friends. Unlike Google Buzz and Facebook the ways to create and categorize friends is very interesting in Google+.

Its called Google+ Circles. By the view of it, you can just drag and drop the names of friends into these circles which is actually synonymous to the groups that you could have experienced in any social network earlier. And when you share stuff, you can choose to share it only to specific circles so that you don’t have to convey unnecessary information to friends. In the same time, you don;t also receive unnecessary information.

People are kind of fed up with the status message stuff that’s been happening for ever in Facebook. And recent surveys even revealed that the excitement on the status messages has gone down in Facebook.

Another interesting feature is the Google+ hangouts, which basically is a group video chat feature. You might see messages like “John is hanging out with 3 other people – Join Hangout”. And if you join, what you will see is a group of videos of friends in the hangout, very similar to Skype. This is very interesting as this feature hasn’t been implemented on a large scale in any social network.

Google+ has a feature called Huddle, which actually is group chat that help friends discuss stuff in a group. More like a broadcast message to a specific set of people who can reply and build conversations inside the Huddle. This can help in small time event management and decision making. Like when you want to sell your bike and you want to ask your friends before putting an open Ad for it, you can start a Google+ Huddle.

There is also the sharing feature that Google+ calls Sparks. This is a common feature that is there in all the social networks. It is because of the simple fact that if people find something awesome, the first thing they would want to do it to talk about it.

If you ask me to present it in a simple way, here is how the Google+ project is feature-d.

Google+ Circles               -    Groups
Google+ Sparks               -    Text Sharing
Google+ Instant Upload    -    Video Sharing
Google+ Hangouts           -    Group Video Chat
Google+ Huddle               -    Group Text Chat

“Is that all to it?” is the question that comes into my mind now. Well, we have to wait for it to be released to everyone. I only hope Google+ will be a very successful if they are thinking it right this time. I am actually very impressed with the way the UI is being shown in the videos. It can drastically take a large chunk of people away from Facebook.