I'm sorry. It's just... I react to certain doom in a certain way. It's a bad habit.

So on Tuesday Google took the covers off their new social endeavour, Google+. Anyone not looking very hard would simply dismiss it as a clone of Facebook, and admittedly parts of it are, however I feel that Google+ may just be what the social and communication space needs to move forward and that people shouldn't ignore its possibilities.

Saying that, it still worries me that Google is running this product. Innovation and great technology are their bread and butter, but understanding people is something they have yet to fully wrap their heads around. Just look at Buzz, an ill-conceived twitter clone, Wave, a communication product that no one understood what its purpose in life was and Android, incredibly sophisticated and customisable, but a mess for the non-techy to understand.

With plus Google is off to a good start, and the general UI improvements rolling out across all of Google's services gives me much hope. So what is Google+ and why is it worth moving from the Facebooks? In a nutshell, its because (amazingly) Google has understood how social interaction works better than Facebook and it all comes down to circles.

Facebook achieved mass acceptance when everyones mum started joining it. The problem with this is not that I don't want my mum there, but that I don't want to tell her everything about my life. As much as I lover her, she is not my "friend" as Facebook so elegantly characterises everyone. My University lecturer is also not my friend, but there are certainly reasons I would want to communicate and share things online with both of them. In Mark Zuckerberg's world everyone is a friend or a stranger, and I have the option to send status updates to all my friends or everyone on the Internet. There is no granularity.

What Google has created is an elegant UI for creating groups of people I know known as circles. Whenever I post a status update, share a link or upload a photo, I can choose which social circles I share this information with. This is much closer to how the world actually works. The human mind segments people into groups and in life you deliberately change how you behave and what you say with these groups. While I would be more than happy to show pictures of my graduation with everyone I know, I would be much less comfortable with my parents seeing pictures from the nights drinking that followed it. In the same fashion, I might want to rant about a bad day at work with friends, but if my boss or other employees are my friends on Facebook, I would be much less eager to do so. Google has solved this problem in the geekiest way possible; venn diagrams.

We're "hanging" outWhile launching a competitor to Facebook they simultaneously created a Skype killer on the same day. One of the best features of Google+ is "hangouts", the ability to launch a live video chat in the browser window (no desktop client required) and invite different circles to join. This allows you to have interactive video chat in the browser with multiple people for free, and it even has some great technology behind it, like focus switching to the person currently talking and the ability to share YouTube videos and scrub to the same location for everyone watching. To use Skype I had to instal and teach my mum how to use it. Now when I move out my whole extended family could have a group video call, and I wouldn't have to teach them how to get it working.

They also integrated Twitter functionality at the same time, allowing you to follow anyones public updates without a "friend request". Its up to me who I show data to, and my friends if they share with me. This is much more natural than the incredibly formal "request" of friendship.

I think Google is onto a real winner here. They have fixed the major flaw in Facebook's design and introduced socially revolutionary technology to people of all skills. And thats not forgetting that it doesn't have a lot of the cruft that Facebook has, such as application spam and is inherently open about the data it collects where Facebook is closed. Facebook could (and may) integrate Skype and create friend lists tomorrow, but Google has put their stake in the ground and isn't likely to give up easily.

The problem will be in convincing everyone to move over. And if everyone doesn't, how people handle a fractured landscape where some people are on Facebook, others on Google+ and others on both. Its certainly going to be very interesting.