Google has <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/app/google/id447119634?mt=8">just released</a> a new version of its Google+ iPhone app, and boy is it impressive. This release features crisper fonts, larger profile pics and a friendlier home-screen. In addition, Google worked to make <em>the stream</em> easier to scan and easier on the eyes, with overlays, gradients and other visual elements.</p>
<p>Google+'s original app for iPhone never received much praise, but this latest iteration is, for lack of better words, surprisingly good. Given how unexpectedly sexy this app is, my intuition leads me to believe that the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/03/16/google-confirms-that-it-has-hired-kevin-rose-daniel-burka-and-other-milk-employees/">acquihire of Kevin Rose and the Milk team</a> has played a part in this.

Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we're starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages. This way you can see what your circles, journalists covering the story and notables like politicians or others who are the subjects of stories have to say about breaking news, and even contribute to the discussion directly from Google News.</p><p>

Note that these Google+ discussions will only appear for those of you reading the US edition who have signed in and upgraded to Google+.

By crippling functionality on sites Google owns (like YouTube) and forcing users to "upgrade" to a service that they may not want or need to get that functionality back, Google is making a huge and annoying mistake.</p><p> You get people to enthusiastically use services by making them compelling and awesome and easy to use. You don't get people to enthusiastically use your services by forcing them to. In fact, that's probably a great way to ensure that a huge number of people who may have been interested in trying out your service never even look at it.

When your visitors come across something interesting on your site, sometimes you want to encourage a simple endorsement (like +1). Other times, however, you want to help visitors share with their friends, right away. Today's new <a href="https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/share/">Google+ Share button</a> lets you do just that.

Fans may love the fact that pictures and videos are featured more prominently on G+ than other sites, but it also makes navigation quite bit more cumbersome. Right now on Twitter, I can view eleven tweets without having to scroll down. On Facebook, there are four stories, complete with photos. Google Plus? My newsfeed home screen is showing me one giant picture from Tom Anderson‘s recent vacation, which takes up the entire vertical space. To its right? A vast white gulf of sheer nothingness. For those making the “prettiness” argument as to why G+ is superior to Facebook, I just don’t see it.

I’ve been meaning to write my “Google+ Is Like The Apple Store For Google” piece for some time. Maybe I’ll never get to it now. But you know when you go into an Apple Store, and it’s filled with sometimes scary Apple fanatics who seem to have arrived at a holy place? That’s Google+ for Google.</p><p>

If Google+ isn’t anything else, it’s a place that Google fans can call home. It’s a place that Google’s never really had before, a spot for its millions (and let’s face it, there are millions) of fanboys and fangirls to rejoice in all things Google.</p><p>

I’ve experienced this firsthand in my time at Google. I’ve learned that if I share anything negative about Google, I can expect to get comments, sometimes many, asking why I hate Google or am biased against Google.

Google never said “What you’re doing is broken. Use our thing instead.” They always said “Did you know you we can do that too, for free?” Did they say Excel was broken when they let you make spreadsheets in Docs? Did they break down email to its bare bones and remake it for Gmail? Of course not. Google was about ubiquity, diversity, and a few memorable little quirks or improvements that set them out from the crowd.

To attempt to build something new, a la Apple, with the assurance that company likes to make (“This is the best way, which is why we made it the only way”) is not a Google strength. They just aren’t good at making new things. Never have been. Making existing things easier, faster, more accessible — sure. But inventing them? Not so much. So the idea that they were going to invent a new way to share should have rung alarm bells to begin with.

Sharing was never broken; Google merely found that they were losing a battle they had not even prepared for. Their declaration of war was a declaration of defeat.

The current (global) Google Trends chart for ‘Google Plus’ - a clear indication of how it is sliding away into irrelevance.

Google added the social-networking service in a bid to keep users on its site longer and boost ad revenue. The company said in January that Google+ had topped 90 million members, more than double the amount in October. Still, its user base is dwarfed by Facebook Inc. (FB)’s 845 million-plus members. And ComScore Inc. estimates that Google+’s members spend a fraction of the time on the site than their Facebook counterparts.

Google+ is the basis for a broader shift at the Mountain View, California-based company, Gundotra said.

“Google+ could be viewed as Google 2.0,” he said. “Google+ is the next generation of all of Google becoming unified because it understands you and your relationships. And so all services get better.”

“This is just the next version of Google,” Mr. Gundotra said, noting that he sees Google Plus as a social blanket that envelopes the entire Google experience. “Everything is being upgraded. We already have users. We’re now upgrading them to what we consider Google 2.0.”

In Google’s eyes, citing the amount of time people spend on Google Plus would be like judging a takeout restaurant by how many people sit down to eat at a table, even though a number of people take food to go.

But Nate Elliott, a vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, said the numbers just are not adding up correctly.

“I don’t know how you can have a social layer without having a social network that people use,” Mr. Elliott said in a phone interview. “If Google is saying that someone who once signed up for Google Plus makes them an active user, then that’s not entirely convincing.”

Isn’t it curious that Google+ doesn’t actually show you any ads? It’s because the time-on-site and page views there are trivial. Hit the road, Jack. Don’t you ever come back and post an update, upload a photo, or add anyone to your Circles. It doesn’t matter. What’s important to Google is getting your biographical data.

according to Compete, Google+ visitors went to the site less than three times a month and spent about three and a half minutes per visit (on average from July 2011 through January 2012). Facebook visitors, on the other hand, ended up visiting Facebook about 21 times each month, spending almost 20 minutes each time they visited. This works out to a little over 10 minutes spent on Google+ compared to about 7 hours spent on Facebook.

Earlier this week Twitter put out a statement saying that they thought this new search integration was “bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

I disagree. Sure, it may be be bad for *Twitter*, but to say it’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users is wrong.

This Safari Extension is based on the bookmarklet by focusontheuser.org. It is just a wrapper for their code and the original developers receive all credit.

The video by Focus on the User explains pretty much everything. The only difference between the bookmarklet and my Safari extension is that you don't have to activate it.

How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.

This isn’t the first time Google has tried to mislead with statistics about Google+. In July, Page claimed that the service had <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/14/larry-page-on-google-over-10-million-users-1-billion-items-shared/">10 million users who shared 1 billion items a day</a>.

That sounds incredibly impressive. But let’s do the math.  That would mean that the average user was sharing 100 items a day. Robert Scoble was flooding my feed before I blocked him, but I don’t think even he was sharing 100 items a day. (I have since unblocked him.)

So how did we get to that number? Well, it turns out Google was counting every potential recipient of that message. A single message from Scoble today would count 240,000 times toward that number. That’s preposterous.

Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place.

Here’s what Page said, according to the transcript of his remarks he posted on Google Plus:

"I’m also pleased to announce that there are over 90M Google+ users — well over double what I announced just a quarter ago on our earnings call. Engagement on + is also growing tremendously. I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: +users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly."

Note that Page said users are “very engaged with our products” — “products,” plural. So 60% of the 90 million people who have created Google Plus profiles engage with some Google product every day, but that product could be Gmail, Google Documents, Google Calendar or even just Google Search. Google just isn’t breaking out how many of those 90 million users are actually visiting G+ pages every day, week or month.

"The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expanding its antitrust probe of Google, the world’s most popular search engine, to include scrutiny of its new Google+ social networking service, according to two people familiar with the situation.

"The competition issues raised by Google+ go to the heart of the FTC’s investigation into whether the company is giving preference to its own services in search results and whether that practice violates antitrust laws, said the people, who declined to be identified because the probe isn’t public."