Four months ago, Google jumped into the social networking arena, launching Google+ to compete with social media juggernaut Facebook. The two services have a lot in common: Similar basic interface, similar privacy and sharing options, and video and text chat capabilities.

But some in the social media community prefer Google+ to Facebook because they say it’s simpler, and the way it lets users share content is more streamlined than on Facebook. But Google+’s major shortfall—its lack of users—is hurting it, they say.

“I prefer it more than Facebook,” said Terry Irwin, a Fayetteville resident who has been using Google+ since shortly after the service became available. “I think the design and kind of the general idea of it [are great].”

“It’s a lot simpler than Facebook. It’s a lot cleaner. You don’t have the mess that Facebook has sort of become,” said Adam Call Roberts, a UA graduate who now works as a producer at 40/29 News.

One of the most popular features on Google+ is “Circles,” the platform’s system for letting users separate and categorize others on Google+. Users can separate the people they are connected with into smaller groups of colleagues, friends, family, acquaintances or other “Circles”—allowing users to easily share or access content only in a particular group of people.

“The ‘Circles’ I think are a pretty awesome idea,” Irwin said. “The way you can cater what content you want to be shared with who. And you’ve got a lot more control over what you see.”

“The best part about it is how easy it is to set your privacy settings,” Roberts said. “If I have something from the Onion that I want my friends to see, but I don’t want my grandma to see I can put it up on Google+ anyway and I can just choose who sees it very easily.”

However, Facebook has added similar friend grouping and sharing options to its platform since the launch of Google+.

Google+ also lets users video chat with multiple other users with its “Hangout” feature, which is similar to Skype’s service (Facebook has also recently added a similar video chat service).

“Sparks” is one of Irwin’s favorite features on Google+ because it lets him organize his “Stream”—the equivalent to Facebook’s “Newsfeed”—to show news and information based on keyword searches, he said.

“About 90 percent of the way I’ve found a lot of the stuff I find news-wise about Ron Paul is through my Google ‘Sparks,’” Irwin said. “Because I can go in there and go to his name and click on it and it’s got articles from anywhere from USA Today to CNN, any Youtube videos—a whole slew really of anything that hits his name.”

Another feature that Irwin thinks makes Google+ better than Facebook is that Google+ is integrated with Google’s other services, including Gmail, Chrome, Google Documents and Google Calendar.

“Once they flesh out Google+ a little bit more—they start integrating a lot of that stuff—I could see it being really, really, really cool,” he said.

Google+ also works well with another Google product, the Android phone.

“Since I actually have an Android phone, Google+ integrates pretty well with that,” Irwin said. “I have it set up where anytime I take a picture it automatically uploads [to Google+]. I don’t even have to do anything.”

But for all Google+’s great features, Irwin and Roberts both said Facebook has it beat in one critically important area—number of active users.

Since its launch, Google+ has grown to more than 40 million users, according to a recent press release from Google. Facebook, however, has more than 800 million users worldwide.

Roberts said that he is connected with 112 people on Google+.

“And in the past 24 hours I’ve got exactly—2 posts on it,” he said, checking his Google+ account. “So that kind of tells you how active it is. With a social network, it all depends if your friends are using it or not.”

“Right now I think there are still some advantages to using Facebook,” Irwin said. “But I think that has a lot more to do with the sheer number of people on Facebook.”

He said if more of his friends used Google+, he would probably quit using Facebook.

One thing that may inhibit people from joining or switching to Google+ is that most people who have a Google+ account also have a well-established Facebook account and possibly a Twitter account.

Most of what Roberts’ friends post on Google+, they also post on Facebook or Twitter, he said, which renders the use of Google+ kind of pointless.

And the features that he liked about Google+, like better privacy settings for individual posts and video chat, Facebook has added to its platform.

But what a social network really boils down to, he said, is whether or not people are using it.

“It doesn’t matter how cool a bar is—if nobody’s there, you don’t want to be there,” Roberts said.