When I say leaving, I mean no longer actively using. I will keep my Facebook profile open so that photos and posts are archived and so I can keep in touch with any friends I know only through Facebook and not through other channels. But I intend to use Google+ and Twitter from now on. This post isn’t supposed to be a well-written review, just a quick preview of things from the top of my head.

In my opinion, Facebook does a lot of things wrong, but also does a lot of things right. It’s the number one social network for a reason. I hated Facebook when I first saw it. I had come from Myspace, and immediately didn’t like how bland the site appeared compared to others that allowed you to really customize your profile. I only signed up because I became friends with a group of people I met on a course and they all used Facebook. Over the years the website has become fairly powerful and that’s what made it better than competitors. It had better functionality. Events are handy (though a haven for spammers), groups can be handy (though a haven for spammers), and some of the apps are quite decent. On the whole, it’s better than most other social networks. I prefer Twitter more actually but they can’t really be compared because they are different kinds of social experiences. When it comes to a dedicated social network like Myspace, Bebo, LinkedIn etc, Facebook is clearly the winner. But it is not perfect.

Firstly, the ads piss me off. Facebook is determined to find me a Muslim wife. The groups also annoy me. The countless notifications and spam posts about games and quizzes are controlled a bit better now, thank the FSM. Next, anyone can add you to a group. That is the most absurd thing I’ve seen Facebook do over the years. If someone wants you to join their group, they don’t even have to send some sort of invite or confirmation request. You’ve joined. And by default you will be getting emails from that group you didn’t even know you had joined. Sure, you can easily leave, but I end up having to leave groups all the time. On the other hand, Groups exist for a reason. Sometimes you want to submit posts for all the world to see. But other times, you only want to interact with specific groups of people. By starting up a Group with university friends for example, you can enjoy conversations and sharing content with just those people. You have to leave the main page, go to the Group page, deal with that, and then come back again, but it can be done. If you wanted to share something with two groups, you would have to share it twice. Hardly ideal. Even the absolute basics like writing posts irritates me. Why can’t I simply edit something if there’s a typo? Why do I have to delete it? Why can’t I include really basic styles like bold and italic etc? The chat system is unreliable, and only allows text chat. You need to use a different website or application in order to voice or video chat with a Facebook friend, and you need to exchange all your details. Facebook is social, for communicating… so it’s not great having to leave in order to communicate.

Google+ doesn’t do anything completely revolutionary. It hasn’t genuinely invented anything groundbreaking. It just fixes almost all the major problems of Facebook, and introduces some features that all social networking sites should have from now on. The best thing about Google+ is that it’s very simple, but powerful, a bit like other products from Google. In some ways it merges some ideas from Facebook and Twitter, yet it works significantly better than both of them. The main page is like Facebook. You can view other people’s profile pages, and there is a Stream which is essentially the Facebook news feed. This is where you read updates. You can write posts (with styles) and include pictures, videos, links etc. But there is a major difference when posting something that fixes countless Facebook problems with one single feature: Circles. Instead of one giant friend list, you have Circles of friends. Instead of adding someone as a friend, you add them to one or more Circles. Your Circles are private, and nobody knows what Circles they’ve been added to. Here’s an example: I’ve created a Family circle, a Scientists circle, and a Uni Mates circle (and more). On Facebook, if I write a post then everyone will see it. The only way to get around that is to send private Messages (which is fine for one person but not ideal for groups of people), or I could arrange to use Groups with these people. But those people would also have to agree to actually use the group. Google+ is better than that. Say I find a fascinating scientific article. After pasting in the link, all I need to do is select which Circles should be included, and then hit Share. The default is to send to all Circles, but I can easily make this post go out to just Scientists and Friends, since I know my family would have little interest. Next I may have pictures of me drunk and making a fool of myself. I can openly post this out to Google+ just like anything on Facebook, but I simply don’t include Family or Colleagues or anyone else I don’t want seeing the post. You can choose whether to allow your posts to be reshared or not, so if you want something to be private among friends, it will be. And this has been a major issue with Facebook and Twitter. You can even submit posts only to be viewed by a single person, you have a lot of control if you want it, but you don’t have to. It’s really simple.

So let’s turn the tables. Now I’m reading rather than posting. If a friend has placed me in one of their Circles, I’ll see updates and posts shared with that Circle. So if I’m your friend and you send something to Friends, I will see it on my Stream (or Wall). And just like Facebook, they all show up, everything from all your friends. I don’t know about you guys, but my Facebook news feed fills up pretty quickly. I miss a lot of good posts as they get buried by whoever is next. If you have a lot of friends, this will happen on Google+ as well. But only be default. When viewing the Stream, it’s showing all posts that are meant for you (just like Facebook). But at the side of the page, you can actually select your Circles and view only posts from them. So if I click Scientists, I will only see posts from the people I’ve put in that Circle, so I tend to get science posts. I can click on Family and only see what my family is up to. Basically you can filter it by your circles of friends. The main stream simply shows it all. That control might just sound a bit neat, but in practice it really improves upon Facebook. If I want to interact with uni friends, I just need to have them in a Uni circle. When I post, I can choose if they should see it or not. I can also choose to only see things from them, and this is all from the main page, with a single click. No groups, just simple control over what is being displayed to you and to others. If I get bored and nobody is saying anything interesting, I can even turn the feed into a Spark instead. This is where Google sends you the updates and interesting stories on subjects that you choose. It’s like content discovery, and we know how powerful Google is at searching for things, so it works really well.

So making posts and reading them is better on Google+ because your boss won’t see your drunk night out, you have brilliant privacy controls, and you can read exactly what you want to. But there’s more to Facebook than just submitting posts onto people’s Walls. You can also chat. Google+ also has that, and then some. Firstly, there’s a standard chat interface that works like Facebook’s, but seems more reliable so far. You can type to people in real time and they can type back. That’s about as far as the similarities go. On Google+ it takes one click to start a voice conversation with someone. On Facebook, it isn’t even an option, yet Google+ manages to do it and do it well. Everything is fast and reliable. It just works. And if you’ve got a webcam on your computer, you can take it even further. You can instantly chat with any of your Google+ friends with text, audio, or video, and it all works beautifully. No need to load up Skype and then get their details etc. It’s all there and it’s all free. Oh, and still no ads to be seen anywhere. These video and audio chats are just a standard feature of chat, but there is another feature called Hangout. It’s hard to explain the difference, and it only became clear to me upon using it. When you use the normal chat, it feels like Skype and similar packages. It feels like an electronic and planned communication between two people. But Hangout feels like a conversation with a friend you’ve just bumped into randomly. The differences are subtle but it really changes the atmosphere. You can choose Hangout to work with all your friends or only specific Circles or combinations of Circles or even individuals. You simply choose to go into Hangout, and your webcam will turn on. Then, if anyone else happens to go in, you will see them. It allows multiple people to join in. A very cool feature is that you can see everyone at once as the video of them is shown near the bottom of the screen, but the majority of the screenspace is taken up by whoever is speaking at that moment. It highlights the user who is currently making noise. These things might not sound very impressive in words, but in practice it gives the impression of a real natural conversation. In real life, you tend to shift your gaze and look at whoever is talking, and when people talk they become the centre of attention for a few moments. Hangout emulates that really well. And this is all part of the website, light-years ahead of the chat features on Facebook.

Google+ is also starting to do something that really elevates it above the other alternatives. Google has some incredible products already. Google Documents, Google Maps, Google Mail, Google Reader, Google Translate, Google Books, Google News, Google Scholar, Google Realtime, Youtube, and now Google Photos (formerly Picasa). I use a chunk of these on a daily basis. Google have recently added the new black bar at the top of Google. When you are logged in, this stays with you throughout Google. It serves as a link to the other products (Youtube, Web search, Documents, Photos, Maps etc) but also as a notification bar for Google+ and it works really well. At the moment, the Google+ features of the bar only work while you’re in Google+ or at Gmail, but it will be opened up everywhere once it’s live. You can actually write posts from the bar, without even going to Google+ and that includes posts with videos, photos or links. So you can be searching Google and find a website, and then post it without leaving search. Then check your emails or Google Calendar and reply to someone’s comment while checking the details. You don’t even have to copy/paste any links as Google+ allows you to drag links and images straight to the Share bar and post them. Even the notifications work better than Facebook. If someone replied to my comment on Facebook, and I clicked on it in the notifications, I would be taken away from whatever I’m doing and shown the comment. But on Google+, the notification drop down menu takes you further, and you can navigate back, all within that menu. You can read updates, add new people to Circles etc just from that notification drop down, which means you can do it while checking your mail or anything else.

What all this means is that Google+ is actually starting to join the dots and bring all the products together. Once you’ve signed up to Google+, it no longer feels like 20 different products with links between them. Google now feels like one website that does it all. This is something I really noticed when I went back onto Facebook and wanted to post a couple of things. Firstly, I wanted to post a picture and an article (to different people). I opened a new window, went to Google and searched for the article then copied it and brought it to Facebook. Then I went to Google in a new window and searched for the image I wanted and brought it to Facebook. We do that kind of thing everyday and I’m completely used to it, but Google+ doesn’t feel like that. You’ll be able to just go to the web search part of the site and get the article and post it, straight from that page. Then just click on Images, find the image and post that too, all still on the same website. A lot of people are focusing mostly on the new features of the social networking side of Google+, and rightly so since it’s the new kid on the block and should be compared with others, but I think some are missing the bigger picture. In my opinion, Google+ isn’t just better than Facebook because of how it handles friends, privacy and communication, but because it allows you to read RSS feeds, plan your journey on maps, write and share documents, read the latest news, watch Youtube etc. Google+ introduces the new social features, but it also turns Google into an integrated package of tools. Facebook can now attempt to catch up by addressing some problems and by copying good features from Google+, but in the long run it will still lack most of the main features of Google+ which has now inherited everything great that Google has ever done before. Building a decent social network now, on top of their other products, has worked out really well for them.

Google+ is in a testing phase right now, so you can only join if you are invited, and invites are generally closed most of the time. This means I don’t have all my friends on it yet, but even with a small group of people I know, it’s way ahead of Facebook for me now. Facebook now feels cluttered to me, and mostly with things that aren’t completely necessary or even good. Google+ is simpler, yet more powerful because of the way it has been designed. I don’t know if it will become the biggest social networking site in the world. Part of me says no because Facebook is so popular now. Part of me says yes since it has only been available for days and only by invites yet websites are noting that they are getting traffic from the Google+ almost as much as places like Reddit. People are curious and trying it out. If they like what they see, like myself and others I know using it, then who knows. Maybe it will never be as big, maybe it will be a decent competitor, maybe it will become more popular than Facebook. I don’t really care. Either way, as long as there are people I know on Google+, I’ll be using it until something better comes along. And that is my only real gripe with the new website so far, the amount of my friends online. I have quite a few already, but this is something I really want others to be involved in. I want to get my family on here, I want to plan projects using Hangout… Having used the site, I can’t see it failing based on what it does. I can only really see it failing if people don’t try it out. I think that would be a big shame, and I think Facebook will also improve drastically if it has Google+ as serious competition.

If you’re on Google+ already, I’m at http://gplus.to/peterharrison