Google+
I finally got myself an invite to the new Google+ network, and it is awesome! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s essentially Google’s attempt to combat Facebook; and to be frank, if the beta is anything to go by it’s going to be a Fatality.
As you can see in the two screenshots below, the Stream is the equivalent to Facebook’s Wall, and looks and works in a similar way (I think at this point doing anything radically different wouldn’t be a smart move on their part). It contains people’s latest activity such as photo uploads, people being tagged in photos, messages etc. The key feature in this which a lot of people seem excited about, is the ability to select only certain “circles” to share information with (see the third screenshot below).
The other big thing that is causing some hype is the “Hangouts”, these are essentially chat rooms which you can start with members of your circles but with the ability to utilise both audio and video. I’ve unfortunately not been able to try this out as of yet, but if the quality of this feature is up to the same standard that the rest of the system is, it will be very impressive. In terms of problems I’ve surprisingly not ran into any yet, for a product that hasn’t even been finished yet I’d say that is quite a promising sign.