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Google Announces Google+: Its Most Ambitious Social Networking Project Yet. It’s easy to feel a bit cynical when Google announces a new social networking project and my first thoughts when I heard about Google+ were probably similar to those of many others: “Haven’t we seen this (fail) before?”

Google Announces Google+: Its Most Ambitious Social Networking Project Yet

There more I look into Google+, though, the more I wonder if the company isn’t finally on the right track. So what is Google+ anyway? It’s not just a basic Facebook clone but a new Google-powered social network that focuses on sharing content with the right people. To do so, you can organize your friends into groups (or +Circles as Google calls it). By doing this, you can then choose who you want to share content with and keep this information as private and public as you would like it to be. For the time being, Google is calling this project a “field test” and not a beta. Circles and Sparks: The Friends and Content You Care About While +Circles is definitely the core feature of the service, Google wisely went beyond this and added plenty of other features to the service.

Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web. Update: For our international readers, this post is also available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. - Ed.

Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web

Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. +Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most Not all relationships are created equal. It’s sloppy. From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks.

The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. Google+ Now Open to Everyone. After being invite-only for nearly three months, Google+ is opening up to everyone.

Google+ Now Open to Everyone

Writing on its official company blog about the 99 improvements that have been made to the product since launching, Google's Vic Gundotra wrote, "We’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups. " Today's update also comes with big improvements to Google+ Hangouts, including the ability to use them on Android devices (version 2.3 and higher). It also includes search, which is a hybrid of content shared on Google+ and results from around the web. "Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web," Gundotra wrote.

SEE ALSO: Google+ Hangouts Go Mobile | Google+ Now Lets You Search for People & Topics Google+ invites were in high demand when the service first launched in July, and the service attracted 20 million visitors in its first month.