Thanks to my mate Giles in Japan, I’m now on the Google+ Project social network thingy. And I like it. I like it a lot.

It’s perfectly summed up by xkcd’s now viral cartoon.

What is it?
Not Facebook.
What’s it like?
It’s like Facebook.

“So what?” you may mutter. Wellllllll, Google Chrome is like Internet Explorer, except it’s slick, quick and has none of the annoying crap. It looks so much cleaner than Facebook, has a fairly intuitive control panel with lots of drag’n'drop and – the main sales point – allows you to categorise your friends in categories (such as friends, family or whatever you will). It also has some nice mobile and webcam interaction.

It’s not perfect though. The picture galleries get confused and start throwing weird background images up (in Google Chrome as well, tut, tut). Also, it has the usual Berlin Walls that make social networking so, err, un-networked. Why can’t I just suck images in from my Flickr stream like I can on WordPress? Why do I need to upload the same images again? Can’t we have FriendFeed-like functionality that sucks in all my activity to one place?

What will be very interesting is how Google+ takes on the most – only – impressive thing about Facebook: its extraordinarily segmentable advertising.

But in the meantime, see you next Thursday Facebook.