The camera will zoom out and pan away to your online character seamlessly. During the animation, a matchmaking process will be in progress.
Matchmaking will depend on which friends are playing, and what people have ranks near yours.
You can do almost anything you can do in single player in GTA Online.
Each mission requires a rank depending on difficulty and complexity. The bigger your rank, the more difficult the missions will be.
There are around 700 missions in GTA Online.
Missions will be ordered randomly as you play Online.
For certain heists you might need certain weapons, vehicles or characters such as a sniper or a driver. This will also depend on the mission creator if you download the mission from the Social Club.
Some missions are so complex they need plenty of good communication.
There will be descriptions to help each character on its heist function.
You can change weather, time of day, time you want it to rain or to be a certain weather state, radio station to be tuned at the start of the race or mission in the Content Creator
There is something called "team lives". If you have 4 team lives and 4 people, if everyone dies there will be 0 lives left, or if you die 4 times, the team will have 0 lives left, which means if anyone dies, it's mission failed.
You can watch races and deathmatches on your apartment TV.
There are masks to hide from the cops.
The Online will be run on the Social Club servers, data will be stored on the cloud. There are datacenters from NY to San Diego, and more Rockstar studios.
http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/16853/article/gta-5-online-will-have-700-missions-and-more-info-revealed/