The Google+ project: A quick look

Google has unveiled its latest social offering today – Google+, which has been in development for more than a year.

It sounds like a similar proposition to Facebook – a social network to share links, updates and photos – but the major difference is that Google users will put each other into groups, such as family, work and friends, called ‘circles’.

This is something that has been missing from Facebook and will be a welcome feature, as it will allow users to update certain circles, while being able to exclude particular groups.

Google+ does not require friend requests, and people can view updates without sharing their own.

Google hasn’t revealed its plans for advertising on the new service but has confirmed that +1 – an icon that allows users to click and like a search result – will be integrated into Google+.

But the real question is whether Google will be able to rival Facebook? 180 million people visited a Google site in May (according to comScore) but Facebook is catching up fast, especially in terms of engagement. Facebook users spent an average of 375 minutes on the site in May – beating the 231 minutes they spent on Google.

Although the service has received a fairly positive reaction on the web so far, there have been lots of comparisons to Facebook. “There’s no question about it: Google+ genuinely looks good,” TechCrunch says. “But, as thousands of people have already noted and joked about, it also really does look a lot like Facebook.” Meanwhile, NewScientist wonders if it is “Facebook for people who don’t like Facebook”.

A successful social offering would definitely give Google a real boost, mainly by allowing it to gather data on its users. At the moment, Google’s most popular features including YouTube, maps and search do not require a login, which limits the amount of information Google knows about its users.

And a benefit of Google+ is that it is trackable – advertisers will be able to see how brand engagement leads to purchase. Advertising Age quotes Deep Focus CEO and founder Ian Schafer: “If we can create relevant brand engagements with people and give them an ability to purchase the product at a later date – whether that’s three, six or 18 months later – this brings us back to social ROI.”

Google+ is invite-only at the moment but the company has released the following video –