Google’s new social project, Google+ was announced in June end this year with the hopes of stopping Facebook from obscuring it. Even though Google dominates the internet through search ads, but it wants to widen its horizon by making an impact on the social front too. Even though Google’s earlier social venture, Google Buzz was doomed but Google learnt a quick lesson from its earlier mistake. Launched by Google in 2004, Orkut failed to gain as much global popularity as Facebook. Google’s new Google+ Project is an aggregation of social tools hoping to make sharing online seem “more like sharing in real life”.

The features offered by Google+ are similar to that in Facebook but with a difference. The major difference with Google+ is that users can connect to the profiles of other users without requiring their permission. A feature called Circles lets you categorize people into different social circles unlike Facebook which has one generic list of friends. This could help share like contents with people in same circle. So sharing is specific not general.

Google’s +1 search recommendation feature is also a new addition although it’s much like Facebook’s “like” or Twitter’s RT. A cool feature by Google called Hangouts lets you do group chat. A maximum of 10 Google+ users can join in a single video call. A feature called Sparks lets Google+’s users to have content delivered to them according to their interests. So next time you can see Blogs, Videos and Photos related to your topic of interest directed to your profile. The instant-upload feature is aimed at letting the mobile users of Google+ upload photographs instantly to a private Google+ album. Users can then select which photos to share with others. Another feature called huddle is to let mobile users chat over IM on their handsets.

Google’s in-house team The Data Liberation Font ensures Google products would not emulate Facebook type lock-in. Google+ is live already but remains invite-only as of now. Even though this a beta version but the bunch of features offered refines this feathering social network. It is indeed not surprising then that this newbie has already managed to have 25 million users.

Google has learnt lessons from its past failures. With the website appearing all new and attractive at this time, it has gained a huge customer base but it needs to work hard to make the social network fans to switch from Facebook to Google+.