Google Plus has launched, initiating a flurry of interest among the bleeding-edge technophiles of Silicon Valley (the metaphorical one that spans the globe, not just the literal one in California). It’s ignited a frenzy of commentary and participation not seen since, well, not really seen before—few services have started with such furor and immediate adoption.

Some of those A-list technophiles have given up their blogs, simply redirecting their personal domain to their Google+ profile page. Others have claimed that Google+ is the “Facebook killer,” and still others are ambivalent. In reality, of course, much of this is hype, and one of two things will happen: either Google will continue to build out G+ so that it truly is competitive with services like Facebook and FriendFeed, or else people will come to their senses, retract their statements, and write cautionary blog posts on the dangers of getting caught up in a feeding frenzy.

Some commentators add additional hype, claiming that Google+ is “not a social network” and that Google’s announcement emphasized “sharing” and not the “social network” nature of the site. This is, of course, baloney. Google Plus is nothing but a social network at the moment; it has no other features beyond those required to connect people together and group them. This is better known (in some circles [see what I did there?]) as a “social graph,” which is exactly what Facebook and LinkedIn maintain on their users.

What’s really important about Google+, however, is what it’s missing, rather than what it has, at least for the time being.

First, let’s start with Google+’s core feature: Circles. This is the differentiator of Google from other social networks. Circles are a much more flexible method of defining groups; in Google’s case, they are strictly one-way relationships between a user and other people. Those other people can be on Google+, too, or they can simply be an email address. Thus, Google has expanded the implementation of a social network beyond the mere website. If I have a relationship with someone on Facebook, it is owned and maintained by Facebook; if I have one on LinkedIn, it is owned and maintained by  LinkedIn. Facebook has no knowledge of a relationship that I may have with someone via LinkedIn, and vice versa. With Google+, however, I can include any user that has an email address in my social circle; that way, when I share something, that person receives an email about it.

It’s a powerful feature, and one that helps ensure trust and privacy. Google+ assumes (rightly or wrongly) that the people I want to share things with are the same people whose stuff I want to see. Once two people have each other in a circle, they have effectively created the same two-way relationship that exists on Facebook or LinkedIn.

What’s surprising (for a company whose main business is indexing content) is how terrifically difficult it is to actually get content to share with people. At the moment, all content sharing must be done manually. Want to show someone a picture? You have to upload it or paste in a link to Flickr (assuming that it’s stored there). If you upload it to Google+, it’s stored in Picasa; there’s no way to have it automatically sent over to Facebook to share with your friends there—you have to do it twice. Create a cool picture on Instagram? The only way to get it into Google+ is to manually cut and paste the link. There is no automatic import or export of any content.

In all honestly, I have to assume that this will change in the future. WIthout it, Google+ is a mere skeleton of a framework of a social network. We’ve all gotten so used to being able to take a photo on our smartphone and instantly share it with our friends no matter what social network they’re on, it’s a huge step backwards to start living on a single service. However, that’s exactly what some people think you should do. In essence: everyone, stop using all the other services and start doing everything on Google+, and it will be great. Nice idea, but the world doesn’t simply work that way. It took years to get all of my relatives onto Facebook, and it will take years more to move them off. What this means is that, if I actually want to be able to share with all of my friends, Google+ will have to support sharing of data across multiple services.

Likewise, I’m not simply going to stop posting here on my blog; people will not simply stop using Twitter, and next year’s new toy will not fail because everyone refuses to leave Google+. I therefore need to have some easy way of getting content created elsewhere into Google+, since I want to share it with my friends. And having to paste it in manually each time simply won’t work. Again, I have to assume that this feature is coming, but it’s not there yet and, until it is, Google+ seems like a deficient copy of FriendFeed, albeit with a bigger audience.

Google+ also needs to allow better content moderation/curation once automated import is coming. For example, my friend Beth might be a SEO marketer and a photographer. I want to see her photographs, but I don’t want to have to wade through her marketing pitch; Google+ needs to give me the ability to selectively “mute” by types of content or origin. FriendFeed’s “hide other posts like this one” shows how to do this.

Finally, Google+ has to work out the bugs. Most importantly, they have to learn how to deduplicate the user’s stream. It’s frustrating to sign onto Google+ and see fourteen (!) copies of a post by Robert Scoble, simple because others of my friends decided to reshare it. Google+ could take a cue here from FriendFeed and implement the “also shared by” links that exist there.

I’ve reference FriendFeed several times here; I still use it, not because of the feature set it provides, but because that’s where my friends are. If Google truly wants to make Plus “like sharing in real life,” then they have to face my reality that my friends live on other social networks and let me keep sharing with them. Google+ is great technology that’s still raw and will hopefully improve quickly.