It looks like Google is looking at a feature to let Google+ users kick people out of the chat rooms called hangouts.

(Credit: Mohamed Mansour) Google+ has a hidden feature that lets people who start a hangout evict others from the video-chat feature, raising the prospect that Google's social network will get better moderation tools.

Programmer Mohamed Mansour, of Facebook data export fame, brought the hangout eviction feature to light late last night.

"The Google+ Hangout DOM [document object model] has an invisible kick button (just remove its visibility style) and when you click on it, you will see a nice kick bar!," Mansour said in a Google+ post.

The feature is one of a series of tweaks to Google's social network site. More substantive changes--corporate profiles or the ability to search Google+, for example--remain in the offing. In the meantime, the dominant social network, Facebook, is changing, too.

Yesterday, Facebook added the ability to follow another person's public posts, something easily done on Google+ and Twitter. It's also developed "smart lists" to better categorize contacts and added a group chat feature.