It's been a while since I wrote anything,

Today I wanted to pay attention to a recent move that Google made.
In a never-ending war with the major Social Networks (facebook...hmm, anyone else? really?),
Google makes another attempt (Orkut, Buzz...) for a Social Network.
This time it really seems that they've learned their lesson.

Instead of obscuring it with hard-to-follow features,
they simply opened their own Social Network, with some very unique ideas.

A very big advantage the Google has over facebook is Android.
Google is in fact the owner of the most popular mobile OS in the world.

The potential of a Social Network being well integrated into mobile devices
could be a real threat to facebook (especially considering the facebook app for
android is pretty basic).

Furthermore, Google has many online and socially integrated services.
Could you imagine integrating Gmail, Google Docs and a Social Network (ahm... Google Wave ?!)

The Hangouts feature, which lets you open a meet-up place for a Circle (group) of your friends,
Is also pretty unique.

On the Android devices, it seems that the idea of Foursquare-style-networking
(that is, if someone around you is posting, you could be able to contact him/her)
Is also a unique approach as oppose to the boring old friend cycle that facebook has.

Mostly, I hope that there would be a way to import/seamlessly invite people to join from facebook.
I think that for facebook it's a wake up call, too long has the interface been neglected, for example:

Probably the most popular chat in the world (facebook chat)
causes more problems than the IRC chat 15 years ago.

But at the end, only time will tell.