You can limit who sees your posts according to your circles so you can post one thing relevant to family and your friends don't have to have it jamming their feed and vice versa. You have more privacy options as well on Google+ so all your chat history isn't saved and available to google. I'm pretty sure you can do video chat with certain circles of up to ten people. It borrows a lot from FB but adds some nifty features that make it easier to maintain privacy and communicate with people.
I actually prefer it to facebook who have a crap chat, make it difficult to avoid spam and don't give options to improve your privacy but it has to develop a bit more and maybe invent a more unique feature to properly be successful.