After 12 weeks of beta testing, Google Plus is now open to the public. When I went to Google this morning there was a big blue arrow pointing to a +You link at the top of the page enticing you to create an account.

Joining and setting up your Google plus account is really easy, and the drag and drop interface to add people to your circles is so simple a chimpanzee can do it. First impressions are that it could be a realistic rival to the tired old facebook way of doing things. Facebook has been the victim of feature creep and if you have never used facebook before, it can be really complicated to find out how to do things. In contrast, Google Plus has been designed to be as user friendly as possible from the ground up. Plus it is much faster and less buggy than facebook, which I think will be the deciding factor in who wins the social networking contest.

** Update **

If you want to stop the blue arrow pointing at you (which quite a few people have asked me now) there is nothing you can do until Google decide to remove it. I tried visiting other google sites like Google Botswana http://www.google.co.bw/ but most of them have the big blue arrow. Googe Mongolia seems to be a safe one though: http://www.google.mn/