What is this Google+ that everyone is talking about? It it the long awaited service from Google that the social media world has been anticipating for months.This is not their first foray in the social networking world with Orkut, Buzz, etc that failed to gain the kind of traction that they anticipated.

With Facebook fast on their heels, Google had to respond or lose it’s status and influence as the biggest site in the world.

How does Google Circles work?

Watch this video below and it will give you a good idea.

They did not do a big launch with new service and for now it is by invitation only. this way, they are expecting it to grow virally. Larry Page has just announced that this new platform has reached 10 million users in 2 weeks.

Funnily, the person with the most number of followers on Google+ is Mark Zuckerberg with 184,842 at time of writing, more than double that of Larry Page and Sergei Brin. See the most followed people here http://socialstatistics.com/

The best thing about this new service is Google Circles. You can create discrete groups of people with well defined borders so that these people will only see what posts that you want them to see. None of the information leakage and privacy issues that we are getting on Facebook. With Circles, there is no chance of your boss seeing your drunken pictures again.

It’s really easy to use Circles, there is a page with thumbnails of all the people you are following and you just drag them into whichever circle you want and as many circles as you want. They only know that you have added them to a circle but not which one.

When you share an update, a photo or a video, you can select which circle you want to share it with. This is the perfect solution to the privacy problems that Facebook has been trying to resolve for ages.

Cleverly, there is something called Sparks. This works like Google Alerts of a search service where you can type in your keywords and any news with that keyword will show up.

One superhot thing that you can do is to have Video Chats with up to 10 people with Hangouts. I can see this growing to be a great function for doing business if they expand it beyond the use of 10 people in a group. Just this week, Facebook announced that they are going to allow Skype calls within Facebook itself but that is only for one person only.

You can start a Hangout for a particular circle and people can drop in and chat to you if they are around.

For Android phone users, you can take pictures which automatically get’s uploaded ready for you to share with your circles.

This is still an ongoing project so there are a lot of bugs to work out. Can’t wait to see how this one develops. It’s simple, it’s easy to use and I love the privacy settings. It’s a winner already.

Technorati Tags: Circles, Google +, Social Network