Last October I wrote a post about social search, and despite past failures such as Buzz, I predicted a competitive social offering from Google. Now, here we are 10 months later with Google+, which supposedly has added an estimated 20+ million users in just a couple of weeks. An impressive start, yes, but will Google+ actually turn out to be a long-term player?

The coolest thing I have encountered so far in my limited experience with Google+ is the “circles” feature. This allows you to segment your “friends” into different groups. For example, you can share something (maybe somewhat inappropriate) with a group of “close friends” without your “work friends” seeing it (and avoid an invite to the HR office). For businesses, this allows them to segment their communities and tailor content for specific groups (for example investors vs. customers), test ideas with select users/customers, or share “inside information” with social media influencers. Organizing circles opens up a whole new world of customized options for crowdsourcing, learning, privacy, sharing and organization of contacts.

Beyond that, I honestly haven’t found anything in the user experience that is groundbreaking, although I have yet to really get into it. Also, this is a limited beta version. There is still no API, so for now, there are no third-party applications, ads, games, etc. So it’s hard to tell the impact and potential this has for social media marketing.

The big question is, will Google+ be a serious threat to major players like Facebook and Twitter?

It’s possible, there is a lot of potential there, but they might be hitting the market a little late. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I thought when I received my first Google+ invitation was “Really, another social network I have to manage and participate in?” Are people going to add Google+ into the mix when they already have to manage their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts and so on? There is only so much time in the day.

Either way, this will put Google in a good position when it comes to social search. Currently, content within Google+ is not searchable, but in organic Google searches, the more content is shared via social media (any network), the better it does in search results. With all the tools at their disposal, Google is very well positioned to come up with a solution that really connects social and search.

And even if social search doesn’t materialize into a significant market force, Google still has plenty of options to make money by tying Google+ into its existing offerings (paid search, display ads, offers/daily deals and more).