Google+

Just got my account! It’s pretty interesting stuff. My initial take is that it absolutely has the capacity to compete with FB, 1) because it’s a near perfect clone of its key feature of the feed stream but also 2) because it can integrate and enhance many of their other products very smoothly. Some key advantages I see Google+ having:

• Circles seems to address some of the most glaring policy/privacy holes that FB had up front, and it’s slick and looks easy to maintain. Needs a list view though…
• Sparks are essentially topical aggregation, in practice. They seem to have chops in semantic data processing that can really make this useful. Integrating feeds full of things to share with a perfect outlet for sharing them is a great move. 
• Picassa integration makes it a real social photo sharing service, rather than FB’s lower res service. 
• Geotagging check in data + photos could enhance Maps significantly with non-google streetview pics of real world locations.
• They own Chrome; early adopters love Chrome and they can integrate sharing and +1 capability directly in to the browser.
  
• Docs. Imagine the feed showing on the side the last 10 docs you worked on with so and so… Google Docs immediately beats the pants off of FB docs, which are pretty much just collaborative text files. I can see if an SMB wants to become “socially enabled”, there are implications for this that are very exciting in terms of providing fully integrated workflows.
  
• Reader and Search are +1 enabled; I think this will greatly increase the value of Google’s search results in general.
• Calendar + Huddle chat make for a great event planning tool with your friends.
• Video hangouts are pretty interesting. Someone said to me “it’s like IRC, but video”. Watching youtube vids with your friends is great fun, something we do anyway in real life. I can see people leaving this on by accident though… I turned on hangouts in the morning yesterday, and I’d forgotten it was on until suddenly a friend’s giant face popped up on my screen. 
• Data mining and user trust; I refused to let FB mine my gmail for potential contacts, but Google can just do it… which was a huge screw up the last time they did it with Buzz, but this time it worked really well because they just used it to power suggestions, rather than rudely creating my friends list for me. A few people I hadn’t talked to in ages showed up as potential contacts, and I was able to immediately contact them to say hi even though they weren’t signed up for G+, because it’s email. The FB brand, with Zuck making headlines for glibly violating user privacy, doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. They seem to be driven by a dogma of total openness that most people I know don’t jive with.
  

I agree with the opinions in Wired that most people on FB actually aren’t exactly fans of it, and only use it because it has a critical mass of users no one else can match… but once there is a second critical mass of users on +, I know I’ll be using it less and less. I also think that with the more robust OpenSocial integration Google has with other social networks, the whole idea of porting over friends and not having critical mass isn’t going to be as much an issue as the hand-wringers say.