Circles: On social networks, privacy is an important issue – especially the need to interact with specific sets of people. For instance you may want to share your Saturday night exploits with your friends, but definitely not with your boss or your clients. Facebook does this with lists while Google+ uses a feature called circles. Users can drag contacts into circles that represent friends, work, weekend cricket group or whatever they choose to name the circle. Google claims this experience is easier and better than Facebook's lists.
Hangouts: While Facebook chat is a text only feature, Hangouts will enable users of Google + to speak with each other face-to-face using a high-definition group video chat. Facebook could counter this with the help of Microsoft, which is an investor in Facebook and has just bought Skype. A video calling feature using Skype on Facebook could easily take on Hangouts.
Sparks: Google wants to make Google+ a one-stop-shop for information. Sparks allows the user to consume all the possible information on selected topics in one place. Just set up a spark for the topic of your choice and get all the latest from what friends are sharing or from blogs on the Internet. Facebook does not have a feature that allows topic based feeds from the Internet.
Huddle: A Huddle will allow users to chat with a specific set of people at any given time in a feature similar to BlackBerry Messenger groups. Group chats are not supported on Facebook yet.
Instant Upload: Photos and videos from the phone will automatically be uploaded to Google+. Users can decide to share whatever they want, whenever they decide, without the hassle of transferring the photos to a computer and then uploading them to share with friends. Users can upload pictures to Facebook directly as well but it is not an automated feature.
Finally: This is at least the fourth time that Google has tried to tame the social media beast. Previous failures include Orkut, Google Wave and Buzz. So will Google+ make the report card look good, given that naysayers are carping that it may be too late for Google to fell the Facebook giant? Watch this space for more
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