Google+ is making a big splash, but it’s still too early to determine if this is, in fact, a big fish or just a big belly flop. Google already has one social network to its credit, the rather tarnished Google Buzz, but with Google + the largest search engine in the world has upped the ante a bit and turned out what appears to be rather impressive. Not perfect, of course, but then – is anything?

Google+ Basics

Anyone on Facebook is familiar with the basics of social network. You gather up your friends and update each other on the comings and goings of your days, your deeper thoughts and the important milestones in your life. You share pictures, status updates and location changes. Google+ takes all of these same ideas and updates them using a circular concept.

When you first join Google +, you’ll be invited to complete a new profile and to add your friends. Since Google+ is still in a beta or trial version, this can all change over time as Google tweaks and changes the program to be even more user friendly.

Within Google+ you’ll find many of the same things you’d expect to find in a social network taking on Facebook head-to-head. There is the requisite profile picture. There is a tab to keep up with your friends. One of the most intriguing things about this is that you can separate your contacts into different groups – a refreshing change.

You can arrange your friends in one group and your family members in another. You can put your business or work colleagues in with your other acquaintances and then the feeds you like to follow in your Following list.

You can do all of this easily enough by clicking on the Circles icon on the starting page. You’ll then be able to drag and drop images of your current Gmail or other Google contacts into the circles you’re assigning them.

You have the option to create additional circles as well. In my case, I’ll create a circle specifically for work purposes – clients and colleagues – to keep them separate from the rest of my contacts.

As you add each person to the circle you’ll get a notification about privacy concerns and how visible that person is to you and others. Luckily the contact you’re adding can’t see which circle you’re putting them in. For all they know you have circles for people you love and people you hate, and your friend-slash-enemy is treated the same way by Google+ regardless of where you’ve stashed him on your end.

If you’re using this for social reasons only, you can create groups to designate your ladies group, your bowling league and your other groups of friends. If you are using this for work or school, which is entirely possible once the network goes live, you can sort out departments, classes and organize your contacts into the various aptly named circles.

Status, Hangouts and Sparks

Now that everyone is added to your circles and organized, it’s time to start interacting with them. Or you can just watch them – there’s even a “Following” category lurkers will love.

Updating your status has some nice improvements over Facebook at least. When you go to update, you’ll “Share” and you get a nice selection of things to do in the same box – pictures, message, links, video or location. Then, you can select which circles of friends you share this with.

I’d share a message with my friends that might be different than one I’d like to share with clients, for example, which makes this feature vastly more appealing than maintaining two separate Facebook accounts – one for work and one for fun. 

It’s important to keep up with all that sharing, however, as there seem to be plenty of options of who is seeing what including “Public” which is unnerving to a mother. It was not very clear if “Public” can be turned off or taken off the selection list, which makes it rather dangerous for attention-seeking individuals who might not realize the dangers it possesses.

Sparks

If you enjoy following the trends and news in different areas, Sparks is similar to RSS feeds or Digg. You’ll be able to search in the Sparks for things that interest you and then see what is most popular according to Google+ users.



Once you’ve caught up on the news and shared or “plus one-ed” the items you like, you can talk about them with your circles using the chat feature, which is very similar to Gmail chat. The contacts are even in the same spot on your screen – bottom left.



You can search for a contact and see those who are advertised as Available or Busy. Very clean and efficient, and will probably be much more useful once more people have joined Google+. Right now it’s not any more beneficial than any other IM service – especially since it’s identical to my normal Gmail statuses.

Hangouts

If you want to see what other friends are up to, you can join them in a hangout. The hangout is reminiscent of a chat room. You can start a hangout any time and it’s a great place to visit with your friends using Google Voice and video – it’s rather similar to Skype in that effect.

Once you’ve created the hangout, your circles can all see it and friends/clients/whomever can pop in at will if you’ve invited them. There is a potential privacy issue with the hangouts. Once you set up a hangout and invite a group of friends to join you in a video chat session, that hangout becomes visible on their profile for their circles. People you don’t know will learn about the hangout and see who is there. Once the hangout is created, everyone in it has the option of inviting others to join as well. According to Google:



So proceed with caution here – it’s an area where trouble might be potentially brewing for young users especially.

Other Turn-ons, and Turn-offs of Google+

Since Google+ unites all, or most, of the Google platform, Picasa is included as well for pictures and photo sharing. You have the option to upload pictures to your Google+ account and then you can organize them as you can in any photo sharing platform.

You can see pictures from your friends and there is a separate category for pictures from you phone, which is fitting since there is already a mobile app available. At the time of writing only Android phones have the ability to use the instant upload feature on Google+.

Finally, a concern that may not hold much water down the road is the lack of activities and games on Google+. Since it is relatively new, it’s to be expected that there isn’t much going on. Of my two hundred odd contacts, only three were already linked up with me when I joined. Considering I work with a rather techy crowd, this was a bit surprising, as this is the primary market for testing the platform, for the moment at least.

If Google+ isn’t hopping now, what will it take to make the dedicated Facebook users switch? Only time will tell, but I’m reasonably certain it won’t be all of the clever games and sharing apps for Google+. It’s a simple conclusion for me to make since there aren’t any – yet.