With Facebook’s growing domination in the social networking space, Google’s Orkut lost the race long back. The orkut team came up with new UI’s and quite a few upgrades but couldn’t get back their charm. For the past one year there has been NEWS(read as rumors) that Google has been working on creating an entirely new platform to combat Facebook’s popularity. A e-mail last evening confirmed those rumors to be true.

Google Plus Header with Navigation

Presenting in this blog post, a sneak peek to the upcoming Google’s Social Network – Google + (Google Plus). Some time back, google had launched +1 share button. And as we have seen during the wave days, when Google came out with BUZZ that tools, are interlinked. The +1 share button will be playing a key role in the Google Plus platform, equivalent to you can say the Facebook ‘Like’ button.

But here is what I think, the ‘+1′ button scores over ‘Like’ button. Its capability to add improve pagerank, drive traffic and share content with not just folks you know but also across the world on all Google Platforms. More on this later. Right now, I will take you on a tour of the Google Plus Project, of which I am one of the field testers.

What is Google + (Plus) Project?

It is the Google’s new Social Network platform, a direct answer to Facebook. The platform has not been launched yet and is under going field testing. Field testing involves a small group of people across the world using and testing the application to make sure its bug free before launch. Though such tests were done for wave, I am sure Google does not want to repeat the same outcome.

Google Plus Profile Page of Piyush Agarwal

New Features in Google Plus

As of now, mainly 3 new features have been added to the platform namely Circles, Hangouts and Sparks.

Circles: This features involves arranging your friends/contacts in various circles of friends,

A Google Circle

family or anything you want. These circles or in simple words groups will enable easy sharing to limited people.Watched a movie last night? Share the review with your friends. Found technical/work-related videos, share it instantly with all your colleagues. This feature will diminish your requirement of choosing/tagging people when sharing something. The circles are flexible, interactive and quite a fun feature.

Hangouts: This is one feature I really loved and something I found really unique compared to FB. Hangouts are like what its name suggests. You can create a hangout space and invite people to join. Everyone can video/voice chat as if in a conference. This feature will help bring people together in place virtually and socialize LIVE. Though there are sites which are already providing a similar feature, I believe this will be a first for a social network. This feature also shows, google’s capability to make-use of existing technologies. For this feature, google has integrated its talk gadget video conferencing feature which enable users to video chat earlier on Gtalk. So, yes to use this feature one needs to install the plugin.

Google Hangout

Sparks: A simple way of staying up-to-date in your interest areas. Sparks are simply feeds on various topics of interest. One can choose and add interest topics. The interest topics will pull posts, pictures, videos from the interest area. Sounds similar to Google Reader Play. To some extent I would say that this feature is inspired from the same.

Google Plus Sparks

Google Plus Project User Interface

On the user interface aspect, I would frankly say that I was a little disappointed. It does not mean that the UI is bad because like most Google interfaces, the interface is simple and usable. But I found too many elements picked from Facebook. We have had earlier scenarios where Google was ‘inspired’ from Bing and in this one also its no different. Where some UI elements are cranky and seem to be same as the current Orkut one, there are others which seem just facebook re-themed.

Circles Interface

Except the user interface for Circles which does show that a lot of thought was put into the interactivity of this feature, nothing else draws much interest. The image gallery and theatre did seem to be a little improved version of FB. Btw, the image theatre is the only UI feature of Facebook that I really dislike!

Google Plus Image Theatre

Google Plus Photo Gallery

Left -Hand Bar on Google Plus

Google Plus Right bar with Hangouts

The left and right panels do not have much on them as of now. And yes, the first thought that comes to mind is infact correct. That there is so much like facebook here! One can argue that keeping the User Interface similar to Facebook will actually help acquire users faster since there is a very small learning curve here. Something google learnt from its failure with Wave I believe is that, not everyone is very willing to learn new things specially if something similar is already available. Though there wasn’t a product like wave then, the learning curve was a little steep for a layman and the service was useful for fewer than they imagined.

Just today, Google did give away some invites which were exhausted in no time. If you would like to get invited to Google Plus, simply leave a comment below and I will send one as soon as more are available.

You can also head to http://plus.google.com and register to be considered for early invites.