Rumours have been swirling around the web for months that the Googleplex was cooking up a "Facebook Killer" with names like Google Me, Loops and Circles all being murmured about. Well, it's finally here, (unveiled as Google Plus, the slogan "real life sharing, rethought for the web") albeit in a limited access field trial and we've been lucky enough to get an invite and give it a try! Google themselves seem to have been really downplaying the significance of the launch, and avoiding comparisons with Facebook. I suspect as a definite attempt to avoid the same enormous hubbub that attended the launch of Buzz and Wave which both pretty much flopped once they reached a mass audience. At the moment it's a limited field trial, so you'll either need an invite from Google, or a friend to invite you and be lucky enough for Google to pull you out of the hat for access if you want to give it a try yourself.

Our first thoughts

This is a pretty polished product, in fact, it doesn't feel very "Google" at all. They're usually all about the function and less about the interface, but it's clear that the UI team has spent some serious time on Plus, it feels sharp, clean and there's some really good use of AJAX to make things pop out, slide up and generally appear logically when and where you need them.

Coming hot on the heels of the visual refresh this week of the main Google search and the new black nav bar at the top of all Google products it really hangs together and is starting to feel like one cohesive suite of tools. Which is good, as Google Plus itself is a collection of different concepts and tools under one banner. Let's take a look at them one by one...

The Homepage / Stream

This should be familiar to most people and it's probably the most Facebook-like part of the whole proposition, it's essentially a news feed of all of the latest updates from your contacts along with a couple of sidebars giving access to the other main features. Sharing is baked into almost every element, with Share links on each post as well as a Share button in the top navigation. Interestingly there's also a dropdown that on your own posts allows you to stop re-sharing by others on a post-by-post basis. It's clear that following the criticism surrounding Google Buzz they've put plenty of thought into how and what you share with who.

Circles

That granularity of what you share with who becomes even more evident when we look at another main feature (accessible from the toolbar at the top) called Circles. Facebook has some great tools for setting up friend lists and setting very specific permissions on who can see your posts. But they're buried several layers deep and take quite a bit of fiddling around to set up.

Really, who can be bothered spending an hour sorting several hundred friends into Friend Lists? Google has gotten round this quite neatly, by making it integral to Plus from the start, you'll think about your sharing groups and set them up little and often rather than in one big hit. They've also made it really fun to do, with a neat drag-and-drop interface, definitely a bit of "gamification" theory at work there. So you create groups, known as circles, and each contact can live in one or more. For me, those groups are Friends, Work, Acquaintances, and Photography (my main hobby) these circles then ripple through every other part of Google Plus, every time you share something you can choose to limit it to specific people or a whole circle in just a couple of clicks.

This makes it really easy and intuitive to share different info on a personal/professional basis. At a stroke doing away with all those arguments about whether the network is a social (Facebook) or professional (LinkedIn) space, it's both! When you get a new friend notification, you can add them to a circle there and then in one click, making it simple to maintain too. Very slick!

Photos

Although Photo sharing is one of the main nav features of Plus, it feels a bit like a "me too" feature, like they felt they couldn't manage without it. Don't get me wrong it's useful, and it works but it's not doing anything revolutionary that you've not seen before elsewhere. It's easy to share different photos with different circles and there's some level of integration with Picasa, although it seems a little odd when Google already has a mature photo product in Picasa not to have made more of it (but maybe they didn't want to overcomplicate the interface).

Profiles

Every user has a profile, as you'd expect! One nice thing here is that for a lot of users, they already have a fairly well fleshed out Google Profile which is used as the basis for their Plus profile. This means you're not faced with a completely blank page to propagate with information. Unlike you're existing profile, the Plus profile represents a definite attempt to draw together lots of the threads of different existing apps. Buzz makes an appearance, you can see all the things you've +1'ed.

Mobile App / Check-ins

As you'd expect from any new launch these days there's a mobile app that appears to be Android only for now. As we're an iPhone and Macbook based company I took a look at the web app version, which is pretty nice, giving easy access to all of the core features and also adding in location-based Check-In using the phone's GPS. This is of course hooked to the enormous Google Maps and Local databases meaning most places are available to check into right out of the gate.

Hangout

This is probably one of the most innovative parts of Plus, Facebook has been rumoured to be working on a video chat app for a while, and hookups with Skype were being murmured about but nothing has yet come to fruition. It's easy to forget that GChat has been running in GMail with video and voice functionality for years now. And that experience has been brought to bear in Hangout. You can invite selected friends or an entire Circle to a hangout, and it's one click from your Stream for them to be able to jump in. Once you're in a Hangout, there's video and voice chat by default, with the option to pop open an IM chat window and also to co-watch YouTube videos together. This has been particularly well thought out, when you start watching everyone's microphones are muted to stop them from drowning out the video and a Push To Talk button appears allowing users to talk over the video if needed. Very neat.

Sparks

But what about Google Search? Well, they're in the mix too, with a feature called Sparks. Tap on any topic or keyword and you get a list of up-to-date links/articles on that topic and you can bookmark it for future updates. The idea is to spark ideas and articles you can then share on your stream and with your circles. I can see an interesting potential recruitment use here, tap in a phrase like "Project Manager Jobs Leeds" and you've got an instant always up-to-date set of links to explore and share.

Conclusions

So what do we think? Is Plus a game changer? Well, time will tell. It's certainly a much more well-thought-out and easy-to-grasp product than either Buzz or Wave were. It'll be difficult to persuade a mass audience to move away from Facebook, but it's certainly got some real potential to fly if a mass audience takes it to their hearts. Additionally, the way that personal and professional boundaries are respected and built-in at a very low level should be appealing to a lot of users. The fact that within a couple of hours of signing up I've got 24 people in my Circles and people seem to be actively commenting, chatting away, and using it certainly bodes well!

Have you been trying out Google Plus? If so, let us know what you think in the comments...