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The lat­est shiny new object in the online world and social-media uni­verse is Google+ (Google Plus)

For Google­philes like me, the release of Google+ is golden! Though I have  fre­quently stated that I’m not wed to a par­tic­u­lar plat­form or brand — Android, iOs, Apple, Win­dows — it would be a lit­tle disin­gen­u­ous to sug­gest that I don’t have a thing for Google. Be it Gmail, Google Apps (which pow­ers my domain’s email, cal­en­dar and docs), Google Docs, Cal­en­dar, Picasa, Blog­ger, I’ve been a fan. Prin­ci­pally for two rea­sons — 1) Google makes pretty cool stuff; and 2) Google usu­ally designs things with a min­i­mal­ist design. I hate clut­ter, and most of the Google prod­ucts I use are super clean, almost to the point of being sim­plis­tic. The prod­ucts are not inca­pable, though. In fact, I haven’t owned a copy of MS Office for years. I only use Google Apps for my email, cal­en­dar and docs. The ser­vices are seam­lessly inte­grated into my Android phone. (This is prob­a­bly the only rea­son I haven’t yet made the leap to the iPhone.)

Ok. Onto the topic at hand. The most fre­quent com­ment I’ve seen about Google+ is really a ques­tion. Is Google+ a ”Face­book killer?’  Now, I have never been fond of the sadly overused expres­sion about a prod­uct being a [ fill in the blank ] ‘killer.’ Usu­ally, in the Apple-obsessed tech world, the blank is filled with iPad, iPhone, iPod, Mac­BookPro, or iMac. I love my Apple com­put­ers, but…Boring! With that said, though, when you look at what Google’s has done with Plus, it is hard to resist  doing a side-by-side com­par­i­son of Face­book and Google+.

I just signed up, so I don’t have a lot to report just yet, but I love the sim­ple, clean lay­out.  When you first logon, you’re taken to the home screen, which shows your stream.

Where things get inter­est­ing with Google+ is when you click on Circles.

Cir­cles is where you can see all the peo­ple you fol­low with Google+, as well as add new peo­ple. Now, as many of you know, Google+ is cur­rently in a lim­ited Beta phase, so the num­ber of peo­ple actu­ally on Google+ is lim­ited. As more peo­ple join Google+, the Cir­cles area will grow. What’s really cool about Cir­cles is that you can drag-and-drop peo­ple into a Cir­cle, or mul­ti­ple Cir­cles. For instance, I fol­low Gary Vayn­er­chuk. I will add him to a soon-to-be cre­ated “Wine” Cir­cle. How­ever, I also con­sider Gary to be a friend, so I would also drop him into the “Friends” Cir­cle. Why do this?  Well, when you’re on home screen, you can adjust the con­tent of the stream to show only updates from indi­vid­u­als in spe­cific Cir­cles. Face­book does this, in a way, in  your news stream with Top News vs. Most Recent. I find the way it’s set up in Google+ to be more intu­itive and gives you much more con­trol of the con­tent you want to see in the moment.

Speak­ing of con­tent, I love the way you can post infor­ma­tion on Google+. Much like with Face­book, you can post an update, share a photo or a link to an arti­cle. What’s dif­fer­ent is what Google car­ried over from Google Buzz. You can write a long post (Face­book lim­its you to 420 char­ac­ters) AND you can edit your post. I am a stick­ler about gram­mar; and, as Karma would have it, I often need to fix my errors. You can do the same with com­ments you leave on other’s posts. One thing I don’t like about Face­book is that if you make a typo in a post, you can­not go back and change it. You either delete and repost, or live the the mis­take. Not with Google+. You can eas­ily go back into your post and edit and update. You can also chose who you would like to view your posts. You can select pub­lic, or choose from you cir­cles or spe­cific individuals.

Thanks to Twit­ter, the @(someone’s name) has become rather ubiq­ui­tous. Google will take the @ in front of someone’s name, but also intro­duced — no sur­prise — the + sign when tag­ging some­one. I think @ is more intu­itive than using the + for tag­ging, but I’m sure it’s some­thing I’ll get used to. It’s a rather minor adjustment.

I have yet to use what is, arguably, the coolest fea­ture of Google+  — Hang­out. This is the are a of Google+ where you can invite any num­ber of peo­ple join you in a video chat.

I’ve seen glimpses of Hang­out in action on some tech blogs, and it looks really nice, and very easy to use.

I will come back with a fol­low up post, once I’ve had more time to really dig into all the Google+ fea­tures, includ­ing the app for Android devices.

As it stands right now, I’m lov­ing Google+!  If you’re on Google+, you can find me with +Matthew Lyons.