Everybody has an opinion about Google+. People are falling over each other to provide meaning to Google’s new social network toy, especially in the aftermath of ‘failed’ experiments like Google Wave and Buzz. Some see it as a way of keeping Facebook from creating an identity monopoly, others claim it to be a Trojan horse for their web apps. My opinion about it? It’s still about plain old search.

Google is search, or rather getting the right information to the right person. Google+ is their ‘human algorithm’ solution to the problem and the reason they wanted to get into bed with Facebook in the first place. On Facebook you share information, creating this filter of information being shared constantly, going viral, and becoming important to people. It’s a powerful thing to tap into. But now look at Google+.

First of all you can group people into Circles. Circles can be anything, anything at all. To Google it doesn’t matter what kind of Circle you created, the only thing they are interested in is that this group of people somehow share a common trait. It doesn’t even matter what the trait is; these people are connected one way or the other.

After creating a few Circles you then share information, just like on Facebook. But the beauty of Circles means that you can share specific information with specific people. You wouldn’t want to bother your boss with your latest escapades in land of the drunks, but you do want him to know of that new upcoming convention.

In short, you are providing groups of people, sharing a certain trait with information relevant to them. You pre-filter information. And while the Circles in themselves don’t directly influence search, the combination of Circles and shared information, extrapolated against all the millions of Google+ users will provide Google with interesting results about what is relevant to people.

Add to that the new +1 button and suddenly, you are very clearly a part of Google Search. True, the +1 button in itself is not exactly working properly yet. There’s still this odd discrepancy between the +1 on web pages implying an association with the information compared to the +1 within Google+, implying a preference for the information instead.

But that doesn’t matter. In my opinion, it also won’t matter whether Google beats Facebook or not. It’s irrelevant. They just need a large enough group to extrapolate data from so they can improve their most important product. And it doesn’t even matter who that group is, because their Circles will separate the nerds from the geeks and the family and the friends and the co-workers. Whatever happens besides that is a bonus.

That, in a nutshell, is my opinion about what Google+ is. So, what’s yours?

Ugly Sweet

• “How about releasing the game as is? There’s no balance to the game whatsoever, but everybody will be too busy with gorging on the wonderfully addictive dungeon-crawling to notice! Hah! I can just improve it with daily patches! I’m going to be rich!”

Ugly

• “Developing characters? Even the interesting and promising ones? Nah, that would be way too much work . Just give everybody some obtuse puzzles to contend with and we’ll get back to them in a year or so… What do you mean, ‘the game only lasts a few hours’?”