OK, Google+ is the shiny new tech tool out there that all the kids are talking about.

I finally got an invite (thanks A.B!), and last night was the first time I fired it up.

I understand that the Google+ of today is probably a work in progress – so is Facebook, but Google+ in a different way. They’re just rolling it out; some missing features are probably already written and are just waiting for complaints/comments to roll in and stress testing to complete.

That said, first impressions are important; here are my first impressions of Google+:

• This is not a different type of social media (as is the case with Facebook and Twitter). This is pretty much a Facebook clone. Don’t believe me? See the screenshots below – just different skins and some rearranging, for the most part. If you are familiar with Facebook, you can easily use Google+.
   



• Right now, there are not a lot of people on Google+ – Google’s doing the slow roll out so there are as few “Fail Whale” Twitter outages as possible. Good idea. But since there aren’t many people on the service – and so few of my friends – it’s tough to get a real feel for the flexibility and robustness of the site. Yeah, I know, be patient.
   
• The Circle feature is brilliant. Basically, a circle is a bucket into which you add a friend. Relatives, Friends, Workmates – build your own buckets, and put people in one (or more). In that way, when you post/share, you can target only people in whatever bucket(s) you want. People at work might want to know that I’m messing with Google+; relatives won’t. Relatives would want to hear about the niece’s birthday party; workmates won’t. It’s brilliant. And the drag-and-drop interface to adding friends is HTML5 sexy. Very slick.
   
• Hangouts is another outstanding feature that kicks Facebook’s ass all over the place. It allow video chat (via your webcam) with more than one person right in your browser. It’s free video conferencing. I believe the Facebook/Skype agreement allows video chat, but only one-on-one. Very interesting feature – but, from the little I’ve played with it, the least polished.
   
• On Facebook, it’s the News Feed (the Wall on your profile); on Google+ it’s the Stream. And on Google+, you can switch between viewing everyone’s posts in the stream or filter to view only posts for one Circle. Currently, you can only filter by one Circle – you can’t view College Friends and Workmates at the same time. I expect this to change moving forward.
   
• Sparks are areas of interest (movies, cycling and so on). They are populated with articles, but it’s unclear to me how that data gets there. For example, I selected the Movie area in Sparks, and there are headlines/blurbs with links to ABCnews.com, YouTube and so on. Who’s curating these areas? It’s really not spelled out here. I’m guessing it keys off the (fairly) recent “+1” button from Google, which mimics Facebook’s “Like” button. But if that’s the case, how does Google classify a +1 click? How does it know it’s a tech or movie article/YouTube clip? Some of it could be site-specific, such as all articles from TechCruch are tech, but what about movie reviews from CNN? I just don’t know. Oddly, I don’t see the +1 button in the wild right now. I wonder if it’s overwhelming Google, or they’re doing something with it so they have just turned it off. Hmm…
   
• I really don’t have anything of interest with regard to Google+’s privacy. Seems to be structured a little better than Facebook’s, but I didn’t pay that much attention to it. Could suck; could be pretty damn good (feels like the latter).

OK, that’s my initial reactions. It’s a very well made site, very intuitive, and the Circles concept it so obvious it’s a wonder it’s never been used before in a social networking site (or has it?).

I guess the real question is the following: Will people use it?

I don’t see Google+ as a threat to Twitter at all, but it’s a full-on salvo at Facebook.

But Facebook has 700 million+ users. Are these users going to throw away years of postings on Facebook to jump to Google+? Doubtful. Will many users maintain both accounts? Sure. But at the end of the day, both sites are so similar that one will, inevitably, be posting – for the most part – on just one.

Which one will that be?

I guess we’ll have to see how Google+ evolves and if it gives users a compelling reason to make Google’s offering a user’s primary social media site (for this type of social media).

At the same time, this’ll keep up the heat on Facebook to continue to evolve and give its millions of users a compelling reason to stay put for the most part.

One final thought: If Google were to buy Twitter and somehow embed that in Google+, that would be compelling. Google’s got the money, but Twitter doesn’t seem too interested in selling.

Still, that would be a juggernaut!