About a month ago Google released its long-awaited new social network: Google+, or “G+” for short. The service is still in a limited test launch, though it wasn’t hard for me and several dozens of friends to score an invite to participate. Here’s the official Google overview, though a few of us here at Two Rivers Marketing have been kicking the tires and have some high-level observations.

First, it begs the obvious question, “Why do we need yet another social media site to manage?” Google+ is most often compared to Facebook, but it’s different in many ways.

• It’s strictly personal: For now there are no business pages. Google is cracking down on the thousands of companies who rushed out to set up pages for their business or brand using the default personal profile, just like Facebook a few years ago. Google has a small set of businesses approved for testing, but haven’t announced how soon the business accounts will launch.

• It lets you see what’s hot — at a glance: Instead of the “Like” button, the G+ equivalent is the “+1” for sharing content. The number shown grows incrementally each time an item is shared.

• It’s more private: Perhaps the best advantage over Facebook is Circles, which allows each user to set privacy for their posts on a very granular level. Create your own circles, call them what you want, simply drag your contacts to a circle (more than one if you like). Now you can post an item intended only for college friends to see, and you can be assured that message is not shown to your relatives, coworkers, employer, etc.

The number of Circles you can create is endless, and the people you place in a circle never see the label; for instance, I have one called, “No Idea Who You Are.” Very simple, I’ve just found a way to complicate it.

Circles have also been compared to Twitter’s List feature, but unlike Twitter, if you have no people in your Circles, your G+ Stream (or Wall) is empty.

• It makes photo sharing easier: Photos are handled quite differently than Facebook or Flickr, as G+ leverages its Picasa platform.

• It lets you have live chats: Hangouts is a unique feature, sort of a video chat with a handful of others similar to the Skype call feature Facebook recently released. Haven’t done much hangin’ out yet.

I won’t declare this to be a Facebook killer, but it does have promise. G+ has experienced a ridiculously quick adoption rate compared to other similar ventures. My theory is this is driven by two main factors: Google is already a trusted brand — especially trusted in the business world, and people are tired of the Facebook monopoly; perhaps their honeymoon is over. We’re due for a little healthy competition. G+ squares off in certain ways against others like LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and more. But does it do these things that much better than the incumbent?

Prediction: High school and college-age kids will flock to G+ because their parents and grandparents are not there (the same reason many jumped back to MySpace in 2010).

There are probably significant parts of G+ we haven’t seen yet. Google has far more firepower than even Facebook. Watch for more as we learn how the business-specific features unfold. Let me know if you’d like to give Google+ a try — I’ve only got 150 invites left.