Google has just launched a new project, which is their version of facebook, called Google+. From looking at the demo, the interface looks simple and clean. A few nice features like the Huddle and Hangout in Google+ look promising.

https://plus.google.com

With the Huddle, you can send text messages to a group of users instead of one by one.
With the Hangouts, you can have video chat sessions with a group of users at the same time. A feature we wish that Apple’s Facetime should have. Currently, facebook doesn’t have their own video chat feature.

Since this is still an invitation only beta version of Google+, it still have a lot of bugs and user’s usability that Google needs to fix.

Below is a link to their Known Issues page

http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs

The problem with Google+ is that most users won’t be switching over from Facebook that easily. Unless Facebook is doing a bad job of keeping their users happy, we believe that users won’t be willing to sign up to another social network and have multiple accounts that they need to update. Besides, all their friends already have Facebook accounts and joined to their social network. It will be too much of a hassle to re-invite friends or family members to a new social network.

But, like we said, Google+ does have some nice features. Hopefully, with the Huddle and Hangout features, Google+ can persuade users to use their service. Also, Google+ does give new users, that do not have any social accounts, another option beside Facebook.