Irrespective of your love for new and innovative apps, whether you are a geek or not, whether you have a habit of spending hours together sitting on a computer or not, this combination of two words, the second one bearing its origin from the science of mathematics, must have hit your ears at least once. Google+ (Plus).

Google+ has become the latest competitor to Facebook. It seems very interesting and different than Google’s other failed social networking experiments. There are many reasons why you should come to like it, but here are 10 features that we have come to love.

Google Plus allows you to segregate your friends into groups much easier than Facebook does. You just drag your friends’ names to the appropriate group that you designated. You can create as many groups as you want. You can have people in multiple groups. In that way your status updates and the things that you are sharing with those people are seen only by those people and not by your entire news feed the way Facebook is now. So Google has really tried to create a new niche to allow these circles to be formed.

It is basically group video chat. It would kind of be like a status update which says, “Alan is hanging out with seven other people. Join the Hangout.” and you go and join the group video chat. You see everybody on the screen. It is like Skype group. So it is very exciting, something that has not been implemented on a large scale for social networking yet.

Instead of text messaging your friends, you basically can create group chat sessions very easily, so if you have got a group of people who are going for a party, everyone can be chatting with each other. Thus, everyone will be informed together in real time.

You can gather content on the basis of your likes and interests. This will be done by sparks who will collect the content that you are interested in ensuring you that you always have a stream of content at your disposal.

Ripples is a brand new feature which helps you visualize a post. You find a post and then hit the ripples button, and you will be directed to a fresh window showing stats for the posts, e.g. how many times a particular post was shared by a specific person.

This is built within the editing software of Google+. You can do a whole lot of things, like cropping pictures, adjusting different exposures, rotating, and much more. There is no need for complex software like Photoshop for an average user.

Google+ can be integrated fully into your mobile phone, utilizing its basic functions like camera, GPS, etc., and can thus give an impressive Google+ experience on your smart phone or other mobile device.

Google+ comes with a very crisp and thoughtful interface. It is very soothing to the eyes as compared to the interfaces of other social networking sites.

The privacy settings are easy to find and edit, unlike Facebook settings which are very cumbersome. Furthermore, with the help of Circles, one can control who sees what content that you post, therefore providing the right information to the right viewers.

Taking a leaf from Twitter, Google+ allows the users to follow anyone without having to friend that person, a newly added feature integrated into Facebook.

Share with us what your favorite features are about Google+ and why you like using Google’s social networking site so much.