Good article.
How you communicate in real life with e.g. your family is usually very different to how you communicate with your student buddies or work colleagues. Facebook got this part wrong since the FB Wall forces you to publish to all the people on your list, regardless of whether your message really applies to all of them or not. This usually leads to more generic (safe) status updates as well since your messages may be appropriate to a certain group of people on your list but not to others.
Google Circles gets this part right since you can push information to specific friend Circles which allows you to communicate exactly like you do in real life with that group of people. I also like that you can switch the main Stream in order to view only the posts of those in a specific Circle.
Google+ also makes it possible to add people who you don't know personally, to a circle in order to see their public posts within your Stream. Effectively giving you Twitter-like "follow" functionality as well.
The Google Hangout feature is great, giving you the ability to have a video conference with up to 10 people. Whenever someone grabs the mic, that person's webcam automatically moves to the top of the chat window so everyone can see who's talking. The only problem with Hangout is that it can get bandwidth intensive considering SA's slow-ish connections.
I already use a lot of Google's other services like GMail, Picasa photos etc. and Google+ incorporates all of this quite well. You get a black bar at the top of all these services now (if you've signed up with Google+) and you can actually do status updates from all those sites without having to switch back to the Google+ social site. Very convenient.
I didn't have to play with Google+ for long to realise that I prefer it to Facebook due to its more logical approach to functionality, but FB has the distinct advantage that it already has 750 million users and a large part of those end-users simply won't go through the hassle of joining or moving to another social network. I imagine Google+ will immediately make an impact on techie type early adopters but it will take a while (and perhaps some spectacular new feature) to convince the average Facebook end-user who simply wants to share a few photos with family online.
