On Tuesday, Google rolled out its long-awaited social product. Google+ (Google Plus) as we’ve been told to call it, is the larger name for a variety of social tools and enhancements of Google search. There is an excellent rundown of the product at SearchEngineLand.

While they would neither confirm nor deny, the fact that Google was working on a social product for some time was no secret. Bits of information trickled out over the past 12 months, some giving us a pretty good idea of what Google+ would ultimately come to look like.

For a number of reasons, I’m really rooting for Google+. It’s been cliche to say that Google doesn’t “get” social for a long time now, but I think they got a lot of things right this time… and they are making some big bets on what the future of the social web will look like.

Circles is the most compelling feature of Google+

With the rollout of Google+, Google has drawn a line in the sand that sets it apart from Facebook in an important way: Circles.

Facebook is centered around a singular timeline that includes all of your friends and connections. For the most part, sharing something means sharing it with everyone, and consuming your timeline means reading one set of updates from all of your friends. While it’s possible to limit the reach of what you share from reaching certain people, doing so seems intentionally opaque and clunky in Facebook. Not surprising based on Mark Zuckerberg’s public stance on online identity and his open opposition to users managing different “personas” online.

Circles, on the other hand, makes managing your different online personas easy. It gives you the capability to segment your friends into different groups and choose who sees what on a post-by-post basis. That’s a pretty compelling feature that is often painfully absent from Facebook; having no choice but to share everything with everyone is flawed for a number of reasons.

For some it’s about privacy, and keeping separate groups of friends or aspects of themselves separate. Fair enough. But even moreso than privacy, it’s an issue of relevancy. What’s relevant to social connections I have at work is often irrelevant to my friends and family, and vice versa.

That’s part of the problem with the Facebook timeline. Sure, it’s filtered to some extent to show me people who I find interesting, but not the topics I care about. That makes my timeline a much less compelling read than it could be, and it discourages me from sharing things I think will be lost on certain members of my audience.

A big bet on content curation going mainstream

The idea of content curation is still in its infancy. Google+ is the first service to offer a meaningful answer to many of the problems inherent with the way we share content today.

In tech circles we love to share content, so it’s easy to forget how much less common and how much less sophisticated most users are when it comes to sharing content. For many Facebook users, the way they share content is occasional, random, and often irrelevant to their connections (outside of the fact that it was shared by someone they know.) For the most part, it’s a novelty and not a utility.

It might be exciting and relevant to you that you just had a fantastic meal at restaurant X while visiting friends in New York, but it isn’t all that interesting to me right now (in fact, it often seems obnoxious.) On the other hand, that would be supremely relevant to me the next time I’m visiting New York. And that article on your favorite mommy blog about infant development you just read? Might be best left shared with your friends who recently had kids. But whose to say that your endorsement of this article won’t be helpful to me in the future, should I ever have kids?

That’s where search benefits social in a huge way, and that’s how +1 fits into the equation. Over time, sharing (or +1-ing) content makes you more influential amongst your group of friends as they find your recommendations to be useful. For a lot of people, this could make sharing an addictive activity.

The idea of sharing and curating the web and the rest of the world  isn’t a new idea, but it’s something that nobody has properly executed in the past. The Like button was the first step, but up until now it’s been little more than a lazy way to push an update to Facebook. Search capability, Google’s bread and butter, is what makes the difference.

Deep social integration is a sign of things to come

It’s comical to think back to a time only 8 or so months ago when a major point of contention in the SEO industry was whether or not social signals would find a permanent home as part of the algorithm.

So much has happened since then. First, the engines outright announced that they are leveraging data from social networks to rank content. Then came Panda – a major shift in the way Google leverages universal user data (engagement metrics like time on site, clickthrough rates, etc.) to promote higher quality content. Somewhere in there, Google +1 came along – an awkward product on its own, but an important precursor to what we now see as Google+.

For Google, entering the social space in such a forceful way isn’t only an obvious answer to the dominance of Facebook, it’s a necessary step in the evolution of their core product. Google+ is full of cues about the direction Google plans to guide search. That’s an entire topic in itself that I’ll dig into in another post.