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."