Google+ (free), the still-young online social network from Google, has a totally new design as well as a few useful new features. While the site is simple to use and provides good privacy controls, it continues to trail Facebook for one major reason: it doesn't have a critical mass of users, and Facebook does. However, for some people, Facebook's undeniable popularity is precisely what makes it unappealing—the fact that everyone including your grandmother has an account can put a damper on your online social life. In that light, Google+ becomes an attractive option. Plus, Google+ isn't littered with ads and apps, either. Facebook aficionados may love their apps, but Google+'s Google-centric approach feels more simplified and less chaotic.

The latest features added to Google+, many of which borrow from the best of Facebook, and the revamped look help to keep it fresh but ultimately don't add anything wildly innovative or unique.

Google+ Basics

Google+, powered by Google, is an online social network that, as expected, lets you connect with your friends, business partners, families, and even new people who you don't necessarily know. Head-to-head, feature-for-feature, Google+ is more like Facebook than Twitter, though it borrows some ideas from both competing sites. Unlike Facebook, which requires a mutual agreement between two people for a "friendship" to form, Google+ lets you "follow" anyone, similar to Twitter. Twitter, however, does give users the option of having a private account, whereas on Google+, all account are open.

While not a direct clone, Google+ very clearly imitates Facebook in its essence. The primary way you interact with Google+ is by posting messages ("status updates" in Facebookese) and watching and responding to the content that other people post. In Facebook, these updates roll into a news feed. In Google+, it's called a stream.

One of Google+'s big features is called Circles, which are groups of friends that you create. They're easy to manage through an elegant drag-and-drop interface that can pop up at nearly any point in your social networking experience. The purpose of circles is to let you share content with only the people you choose, rather than the whole world or all your friends. While Facebook also has this capability, Google+ makes it much simpler to use. Part of the reason it's difficult in Facebook is the feature wasn't always available, so older posts—that maybe you've forgotten about and maybe you posted long before you dad joined Facebook—may be public.

Like Facebook, Google+ lets you share photos and videos. Google gives you virtually unlimited storage: you're capped at 1GB, but photos that measure 2,048 by 2,048 pixels and smaller and videos 15 minutes or shorter don't count toward that limit. Unless you're seriously into photography or videography, you'll never even approach the limit.