Google (News - Alert) announced it has begun signups to test a business version of the company's new social networking platform, Google+.

Google’s business networking platform will compete with Facebook (News - Alert). Like in Facebook, Google+ allows business owners to create a contact listing based on a consumer e-mail address, with business details put into the personal profile.

The launch is significant as Facebook is emerging as a major marketing platform for businesses.

According to a blog in Techgoondu.com, Google+ resembles Facebook in several aspects, but indeed, it comes with its own unique features as well. For example, the ‘Circles’ feature allows users to organize connections in a sensible manner – a bit different from Facebook’s way of classifying all of them as “friends.”

With Google+, one can start ‘Hangouts’ - video group chats that can selectively invite and display to various circles. Google may earn the credit as the first to offer such a feature in social networking, but industry rumors believe that Facebook plans on forming a long-term partnership with Skype (News - Alert) to bring video chat to Facebok users. This will intensify the competition between the two rivals.

Google+ has ties with the rest of Google’s services. This is an advantage to Google as it gives the search engine the potential to integrate their Web apps into a one-stop portal. Google is also updating the design of all its major Web apps to provide an overall consistency to their look and feel.

Google+ is now readying to beat Facebook that boasts of having more than 750 million users. Google will test the business-optimized version of Google+ with select companies over the next few months, company officials said.