Google+ has only been a round for a short time (less than three months? really?), but has had quite the impact. Consider how many of Facebook’s recent changes seem to be reactions to Google+ (those lists aren’t a coincidence). The only thing really holding Google+ back was that you had to “know a guy” to get an invite.
Not anymore. Google+ is now a beta app. With most companies, beta versions are per-releases. However, Google has made it their own special term for fresh apps. Gmail, Google Docs, Finance, and Voice all launched first as public betas. Google has changed more than just the label and the entry requirements though. Google+’s innovative chat solution, Hangouts, now works on the mobile client. This is a killer feature and may be more killer now that they’ve opened the API. This has real potential for small businesses. They’ve also enabled searching on G+, the lack of which was kind of amusing considering the company’s core competency.
Only time will tell if Google+ goes from being something people have as well as another social network or if it will do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, but boy is it going to be fun to watch.
[…] we get it, you felt threatened by the wider release of Google+, but did you have to panic that bad, randomly changing virtually every way we’ve learned how […]