Promising to bring 'real-world interactions' and 'real-life sharing' online, 'Google Plus' lets users post photos, messages, comments and other content from selected groups of friends.
"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," Google's senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post.
It said its new service aims to 'fix' the 'broken' and 'awkward' way people interact online.
"Through the Google Plus project, we'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software," Gundotra said.
Google Plus will be available as an application in the store on Android operating system-based mobile phones.
The service has been started as a field trial that may have some 'rough edges' and the project is by invitation only, which is expected to be made available more broadly in the future.
The service has features like 'Circles', 'Sparks', 'Hangouts' and 'Mobile'.
Through Circles, Google targets Facebook's features in which a user's information is shared by default with a large number of his or her friends, including their work colleagues and acquaintances, rather than only their close personal friends.
"The problem is that today's online services turn friendship into fast food -- wrapping everyone in 'friend' paper --
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