It reminds me a little of FourSquare for things to do instead of places to go.

And I’ve got invites over @clicknathan, just hit me up.

Despite the claims by Google that Plus is not a replacement for Facebook, anyone who’s ever used both services knows that’s exactly what it’s trying to be. I see Google+ as having the following purposes, in this order:

1. Provide Google with more information about who we are as people, not just what we’re looking for on the web. They want to organize the world’s information, and now see human interactions and interests as part of that information needing to be organized.
2. Replace Facebook as the #1 destination on the Web for the plethora of users out there who primarily get on the Internet to see what friends, family, and friends and family’s pets and babies are up to. Google is still the #1 visited site on the web, but Facebook is on a mission to overtake that spot.
3. The backbone of Google’s “Unification” of services, where they’re finally stepping out of their old “we’ll do a thousand things, and put about 50-90% of our efforts into those things” and moving into “we’re only going to do five or ten things, and try and do them 100%”

So What Has Google Added, Exactly, with Plus?

Well, they’ve added a bunch of +1 buttons all around my online life. I can +1 a search result, which gives me the unusually powerful ability to change search results for myself and people in my Circles. It’s a very powerful feature, because if I +1 a site, chances are it’ll be the top result for particular queries for me from now on, and likely will affect my friends’ queries as well. To be honest, I don’t particularly like that. I use +1 to bump pages which are more valuable to me to the top, so I can immediately recognize them when needed. For example, in the Web Design business, I often need to find HTML entities. If you’re not familiar, they’re short codes that represent certain characters not easily entered into your keyboard, and which HTML needs to have specifically entered as codes to ensure proper rendering.  , → and » are good examples. They make a space (you can only do one spacebar space at a time with HTML, so you need to add in the HTML entity if you want multiple spaces in a row), an arrow pointing right, and a “right double angle quote” symbol (also known as “sharrows” in the bicycling world). I know which site has them displayed the way I want them displayed, and which site makes it easy to find them on the page. So I +1′d it, right. Now I don’t have to worry about another page overtaking that page as the #1 result for whatever reason.

The theory is, that if my buddy Dom Giblioni +1′s a steakhouse in Pittsburgh’s Southside, the next time I look up [southside steakhouse] I’ll get to see his +1 recommendation. That’s cool, if Dom knows what he’s talking about. If he doesn’t, suddenly the real #1 result—the one that’s been voted on using a pretty great algorithm invented by a bunch of really smart guys who basically have created a voting system by where the entire web votes on which sites are best, or in this case, which steakhouse in the Southside is the best—then isn’t the best option, but just the best opinion out of all of my friends who’ve bothered to +1 something.

Of course, +1 isn’t the only thing Google has added, it’s just the most influential. They’ve also added a few cool features like Hangout, which if I had a bunch of friends who’d rather sit around on computers and chat than meet up at the bar, would be cool. But I don’t, because that’s kind of stupid. Circles is a truly cool addition, and gets rid of the blight on Facebook where “My mom joined, so now I don’t use Facebook anymore” because as we all know, the majority of what FB is about is posting pictures of last night’s debauchery.

Finally, they’ve added a big black bar to the top of my browser where anytime I’m in Gmail, Google Calendar, search, etc., I’m able to pretty easily post something to my Google+ stream. I rarely do that, but I’m sure it’s a useful feature for…reposting things from Google websites to another Google website? Think about it, that black bar with the easy-to-share feature doesn’t show up when you’re reading through Wikipedia, it doesn’t show up when I’m checking reviews on Amazon, it doesn’t show up when I’m “exploring” my neighborhood via Yelp. It only shows up in places where essentially I’d be sharing the following.

“Hey, you’re on a Google website right now, check out this other Google website that I was able to easily share with you!”

The exception to this is Google Reader. Reader is the only place Google has been able to shine in the social realm. I had friends on Google Reader, and I could share with them whatever latest stories I found interesting. I knew I could go there to not only read the RSS Feeds I was personally interested in, but to see what my friends were sharing as well, opening me up to new stories and websites of interest to me. I could figure out which of my friends were consistently sharing good material, and continue to follow them, or quit reading ol’ Dom’s posts from hamsterfarts.com. Even as I struggled to figure out how Twitter was going to be a good time, even as I actually did quit Facebook, and all the while I never gave a damn about MySpace or Friendster or any other pre-FB social network, I stuck around Google Reader because it offered me a service, and made that service fun to share with friends.

Unfortunately, Google+ took over Reader, instead of integrating with it. It’s like the people in charge of both said “Okay, scrap what Google Reader is, we’re going to remove features from Reader because they’re similar to those on Plus.” What they should have done was say, “Okay, we’ve got two products here that do similar things, how can we integrate them.” Google+ is the newest addition to Google’s long list of forays, but it’s suddenly getting so much attention that it’s overtaking time tested older sites. How difficult would it have been to make all of my Reader friends into an automatic Circle, which then by sharing on Reader could be seen in both Reader and Plus, depending on what the user wants.

Google’s going to be around for a long time. They’ve built a base that isn’t going to be easily overturned by some startups. But it’s time for some startups to try and do just that, because I don’t believe they’re innovating anymore. They’ve jumped the shark from “Look, we’ve got Windows 3.1, isn’t this awesome!” to “Look, five versions later we’ve still got Windows 3.1, but now we call it 7 and it’s way shinier!”

I’ve recently noticed that people who are in one way or another associated with my Google account (whether they’re in a circle on Google Plus, a follower in Reader, a contact in Gmail or perhaps a follower on Buzz) have been +1′ing things all around the web, and they’re now at the top of the list when I search for particular terms. So if a friend of mine +1′d a site called nevermindifoundmykeys.com, and I searched for “where are my keys at?”, it’s likely that site will beat out all other key-finding sites flat out, hands down, no SEO, web design or link juice about it.

That is phenomenally powerful. Google is somewhat like a democracy: every link to another website counts as a vote (even if some votes are more important than others, ie a link coming from CNN.com is probably more weighted than one coming from shutupanddancelikeacockroach.com). But now we’re not just limited to voting by posting links around the web (which for most sites where it’s easy to post a link, the vote is minimal or not counted at all) and doesn’t start limiting us to needing to be web developers or site owners to cast our votes. Now, we can do so with simply the click of a button.

And it appears that Google is not allowing this to be exploited either, by a handful of posts I’ve seen around the web where people went around whitehat, good SEO practices and ended up with 1000s of +1s, only to have Google realize they were trying to pull a fast one and removing the bogus votes.

So get to it, folks! Start +1′ing the web and make your mark on the search results of the future!

Hmmm.

Another feature I’d love to see Google implement, similarly to how you can choose to “Avoid Highways” and “Avoid Tolls” when getting directions in Google Maps, is “Local Businesses Only” or “Avoid Chains”. When I do a search in Oakland for coffee shop, I don’t want to see every Starbucks and Caribou Cafe in the area, I want to know about the Crazy Mocha right around the corner.

I’m just concerned that if Google doesn’t wise up and get street smart ASAP, they’ll find themselves down the wrong stretch of Panther Hollow late one night without a flashlight and coming up against a drunken Steely McBeam looking for the morning’s hangover booze money…

Over the years, Google has grown from a great web search company with a lousy logo to an all things web — email, calendars, social networking, healthcare, video — whatever can be done on the web, it’s likely you’ll be touching on Google’s toes to get to it.

But the problem is, Google still isn’t smart enough. For example, if you search for pgh, the three letters Pittsburghers use to shorten their city’s name for bumper stickers and the like, Google brings up a stock entry for Pengrowth Energy Trust. They’re up 0.01 as of today, but really, who cares? Searching for Pittsburgh produces utterly different results, including a map. Anyone from Pittsburgh and probably most of the five people who care about Pengrowth Energy are aware that PGH = Pittsburgh, but Google can't seem to figure it out. I mean, we're talking about a behemoth web company that previously employed scholars to answer people's search queries and has offices in prestigious colleges like Pittsburgh's own Carnegie Mellon University. What's the issue, here, PGH?