As Google+ reaches ten million users, it’s probably about time that we came up with a review of our own. The first thing you need to bear in mind that it is still only in the beta testing stages, so some aspects are not going to work as smoothly as you might hope and it’s by no means the finished article.

Many have struggled with the initial process of setting the profile up, which frankly, makes no sense to me. It’s a very user friendly process; really, anyone even remotely tech savvy should be able to complete it in a few minutes.

From a communication perspective, Google+ really does seem to tick all the boxes. The Hangouts tool stands head and shoulders above the other social networks, i.e. Facebook video chat. It allows for up to ten people to all be video chatting at a time, which can potentially be used for video conferences in the business world and is also ideal for groups of friends to ‘hangout’ as a group even if they are in their own rooms. There’s no need to get everyone together and agree a time to hangout; just start a hangout with your friends circle, and when they come online they will be notified that you are ‘hanging out’ and will click to join you. It’s great fun and very user friendly.

The other key tool for us is Circles. You can create custom made circles within which you separate your groups of friends, colleagues, and associates. Being able to separate various people out means that you are able to share the right kind of content with the people you want to share it with, and not with those you don’t. So those boozy holiday pics from that stag do you went to in Malia last year are visible to your close mates, but invisible to your work colleagues and family – which is very handy, right? There are, of course, some drawbacks here: for the uber sociable this means trawling through hundreds of contacts and assigning them to specific circles. At first, it seems brilliant and easy to do, but after a while it becomes more and more tedious. Also, each time you want to share a status, you then have to figure out which circles of people it applies to. I would therefore recommend not going too crazy with the number of circles you create!

If you’re already using Google+, what are your favourite aspects? Do you think it’s going to join Facebook and Twitter? Or will it die a MySpace style death?

My top tips:

• Use the Google Chrome browser when using Google+, as lesser known and competing browsers don’t work as well for the moment. That’s especially important when using Hangouts.
• Change your email notification settings so that your Gmail isn’t bombarded with Google+ emails.
• You can stop people stealing your ideas by just clicking on the post and then clicking ‘disable reshare’.
• The incoming stream allows you to see what people are sharing with you even if they are not in your circles.

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More enlightenment and opinion from Madhouse, Manchester’s leading integrated marketing communications agency