Google has announced a social media project called Google+ that looks very promising. The service will attempt to be more comprehensive than other social media services, combining many features into the same application. While Google+ is still at an invitation only proving stage, there are some details available to spark your interest. Take a tour at http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/. Here are what I believe to be the highlights:

Privacy
Comparisons to Facebook will be inevitable with this project, and I want to make one right away. Google+ has a feature called Circles which is made to handle sharing different content with different people easy. Facebook users are still struggling to separate their close friends from their families and from business contacts. When I started using Facebook, I was a freshman in college, and only college students were able to create an account.  We didn’t worry about privacy too much back then. Now that Facebook is open to everyone, and we see the potential for business, privacy is trickier. Google’s Circles seems like a much nicer solution than the limited profiles and public fan pages from Facebook.

Instant Upload
Google+ gives you the option of having all the photos and videos from your smartphone instantly upload to a private album in the cloud. This probably scares the buh-jeezes out of some people, but I’m actually really excited about it. Uploading and organizing the media that I want to share online has become a real chore. Since I’m already trusting Google with private info like email and documents, it doesn’t take much of a leap to start trusting them with my photos and videos as well.  This feature is particularly timely for me because I recently shot some video on a MiniDV camcorder, only to realize that my laptop doesn’t have the necessary firewire port to capture the video. For quick videos where quality is not a huge concern, you can’t beat the convenience of uploading directly from a smartphone.

Mobile access
Mobile social media apps tend to be junk. I’m not very impressed with any Twitter app, and Facebook’s app is pretty much garbage. Google+ was created with mobile in mind from the start. As an Android user, I’m hoping for some really awesome smartphone integration.

Sparks
Not too long ago, if you wanted to read about a topic on the Web, you had to search for a Web site on that topic, then visit the site. For a while, I replaced this method of collecting information with RSS feeds that would pull the info in to one location for me. Then Twitter sort of replaced my RSS reader. Now I mostly use the Pulse news reader app on my phone to read about my interests on the Web. Sparks is sort of a hybrid solution where my searches are aided by the recommendations of my friends to find content I’m interested in. I can’t wait to try it.

There are many other cool ideas baked into Google+, and Google is promising that this is just the start. I won’t know how well it all works until I get to try it, but if it lives up to the potential I see in these ideas, I will use it for sure. Now Google just has to overcome one massive hurtle: adoption. People have to try it for it to be social. I think there are two big reasons people may not use Google+. One reason is that many people are already on Facebook, and sometimes feel overwhelmed by that. They may not want to add another social network. The other reason is email. Facebook creates an account using whatever email address you already have, and there is no user name separate from your own real name. Google will probably require a Google account, and use a Gmail address for email. People who are not already using Gmail may not want another email address to remember. If Google can work around these issues and get people to try Google+, I think it could be an awesome new service.