Google+ Opens To Businesses With 'Pages'

karthikmns writes with news that Google is rolling out Google+ Pages, integrating businesses and brands into its social network. When Google+ launched, it asked businesses not to create user pages, which upset many companies who had grown accustomed to interacting with customers on Facebook. Today's update closes the gap between the two social networks in this regard, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how annoying you find social marketing. "If you’ve established a personal Google+ profile before, then the features offered through a Page will be familiar. You can place people into Circles, which lets you share content with specific sets of users. You can launch video hangouts, which lets you have face-to-face conversations with your followers. And the Pages work through the site’s mobile app. ... But Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a Page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles."

Features in the wrong order

[schlesinm]

Shouldn't Google+ worry more about getting people communicating with each other before they start throwing businesses on to the platform? Where is the API?

Re:Find: Bob Smith

[Synerg1y]

I'd imagine the same as facebook?

They don't really bother anybody, it's just another store front so to speak.

Re:More importantly

[nepka]

They have huge limits on your account if you use pseudonym instead. And they only backed out of real name policy as it become impossible to verify with different nationals and they started losing users. Of course, they are still losing users.

Google just doesn't seem to get the full picture. They imitate Facebook but do it poorly. Lets take for example this pages change. They didn't implement pages properly, they only modified the profile system a bit and actually restricted pages. Google+ pages don't allow HTML or anything else like Facebook does. The absolutely worst thing is the url though; With Facebook you get facebook.com/nintendo. Companies can easily put that in to ads and other material. With Google+ the url is http://plus.google.com/58493672095786225 [google.com]. Awesome! Google just doesn't see the whole picture.