I am familiarizing myself with it as well.
I think, right now, where it will out-do facebook is the unobtrusiveness of advertisements (there are none on Google+), the ability to keep your 'friends' from knowing who your other 'friends' are (avoiding any potential "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU STILL TALK TO ________!" kinds of complications), a simpler interface and a stronger privacy policy. These are all reasons I slowly became anti-facebook and finally deleted my facebook profile a couple years ago (to put into perspective how long I had an account, I joined facebook back in the day (2005
) when only college and university students were allowed, and remember the uproar when high school students were open to invitation).
Facebook also tends to be fast and loose about updating features and in the process rewriting your privacy settings. Whenever facebook updated anything it would change my privacy settings back to the default; coincidentally the default is (or at least
was) "visible to everyone". Everything with facebook is by default 'opt-out'. You have to
go out of your way to keep things you post on facebook private or even semi-private. I hate that.
On the other hand Google+ is by default 'opt-in'. You know
precisely who can see what you share on Google+ because you can't post anything to it without specifying who it's shared with. You can set up a default setting for who stuff is shared with so you don't have to always go through the process of picking out which 'circles' see something, and you can change that default any time you post anything.
Google+ also lets you leave much more easily. Facebook used to allow you to only 'deactivate' your account, which basically just made your profile page inaccessible to your friends but kept a record of everything you had ever posted to facebook and still allowed third parties to access that info. Eventually facebook allowed users to completely delete their accounts after widespread complaints about the 'deactivation' process. On the other hand Google lets you delete your Google+ account (and all the photos, videos and such associated with it), or even go the extra step and delete your Google account entirely (encompassing Gmail, YouTube, etc.).