On wednesday Google did what many expected for quite some time – they launched a Facebook competitor.

In the beginning the web was about static content. While that was fine as long as the web was small, people started to have increasingly issues finding things efficiently. First search engines popped up and companies like Yahoo or Ask emerged as the first ones to try and help the user. But the company that brought order to the chaos was not Microsoft (sorry for the Borg joke) but a new up and coming company – Google. They brought about the first real consumer web. Information accessible within seconds all over the world. 

But this freedom to find anything and create content in seconds led to another issue. With the web proliferating everywhere we find ourselves today overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available. Now when searching for specific things you still get thousands and thousands of results. How is a normal consumer supposed to wrap his head around this. Add to this demand based content and search spam and you get a massive problem. 

But it turns out this problem can be solved by a basic idea – curation. We realize today we need our friends, colleagues and experts to curate information on the internet for us. Each of us can contribute to curating the web so that when searching for specifics we find what we need by asking them. Hence social and the success of Twitter and Facebook.

Google cannot index Facebook (well only public stuff) and so they needed a way to capture the connections and relationships between users and get that into the algorithm. Google+ is an ambitious project to revolutionize Google's index and in turn improve search. With Circles people will not only make their relationships with others available to Google – they will also handover the nature of those relationships. A clear pattern will show itself in time – who are my friends, who are colleagues, who are the people I respect and follow, who follows me and so forth. These can be used to sort shared links, +1 items and more.

While I do not think Google+ is yet ready – there are clear omissions in the first iteration – Facebook should watch very carefully. The simple and beautiful UI, definitely inspired by some of the stuff Apple does, interesting relationship management tools and Hangouts  are compelling features at least for me.

I will be watching Google+ carefully, now I just need my social graph to join. Google has 700 million users to catch up to.