I registered my email address for an invitation to Google Plus today. When you register you are provided with a link to the Google Plus Tour. This is an interesting page built using the same engine and the Google Maps system. There are the familair zoom and pan buttons in the bottom right, and you can drag the canvas around in the same manner. Some parts of the tour are made with interactive flash elements - my favourite  is the instant upload demo where you are shown a video of a man with a cute puppy in a mobile phone frame and when you click on the phones camera button to take a photo, the still image is transferred to a google plus page with a nice flipping animation effect.

Whether Google+ will last longer than Buzz, Wave or any of the other failed attempts at social media is yet to be seen. The main problem with Buzz is that it was just forced on to people with little warning and was instantly disliked by the privacy advocates and the wider online community. With Wave, the system was incredibly powerful, but with great power comes great complexity, and it only ever really catered for the tech geeks that work for google. It was overkill for what most people want from a social network

Google plus is more facebook-like than any other social networking apps from google. There is no coincidence in this- people are familiar with the facebook layout and functionality. Imposing a new UI and operational mindset would alienate a lot of people who have only just started getting comfortable with FB.

My expectation is that Google plus will never be as popular as facebook  which has over 11% of the global population on it's books. The only way it will even become more popular is if facebook experiences a catestrophic loss of consumer interest. One way this could happen is if they aggressively increase the amount of advertising on the site. This is why google became more popular than MSN, Yahoo or AOL - the lack of intrusive advertising meant the first page was loaded much faster and people preferred the more simple layout of the results. Google have recently announced that they are preventing companies from registering google plus accounts for the time being. This means that there will be no gold rush to create accounts and spam other users. Good thinking batman, although I would prefer a more general rule that only individuals could use the service, and if you are a business, then a seperate service should be made availble in parallel to google plus.

If google is the social network which is faster, more reliable, has less adverts and works better, then this is what people will gravitate towards. Facebook does have the advantage of Skype support now, but Google has youtube and Google Talk which can rival skype in terms of in browser video chat. It looks like we may be in for a social networking arms race in the next few months.