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.

You get to email it or send it to particular Circles of your Google+ following. (There's a phrase that would have made no sense three years ago.) Will publishers have two +1 buttons (the old and the new) or, facing button overload, will they go with this one? Having to choose which Circles you send it to sounds, as Orwell would say, plusungood.

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.”

The question is to what extent people want that - or whether they want something more dispassionate. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)

This is very cool:

The ripple diagram shows this post spreading as users share it on Google+. Arrows indicate the direction of resharing. (Only public posts show up.) Circles within circles represent a resharing sequence, so large circles indicate heavy resharing.

Observations: two people basically did all the sharing: Vic Gundotra (of Google) and Brian Brushwood (a magician).

To go with the ComScore data from the other day:

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.

The question is whether people have the spare time to make that additive, whether they'll abandon Facebook, or what.

Over at Google:

A new version of the Google+ iOS app is rolling out to the App Store, and it comes with one of your most requested features: Instant Upload! Once enabled, all photos and videos that you take are automatically uploaded to a private album on Google+ - ready to share with your circles, or the world.

Google wants to be the new Facebook, and Flickr, and iCloud.

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 more you examine his quote, in fact, the less it seems to mean about Google+.

"When I search for Katy Perry I want her Facebook page and her tweets, not her empty Google+ page." Yes, Downfall is back.

"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."

Recall that Google+ is tiny in terms of traffic and external links compared to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace. Then note how its results appear in the first page of searches.

Worth reading in the light of the present fuss in the US over Google's "Search+". Recall the outcome: Google was obliged to submit to privacy checks by the FTC for 25 years as a result of Buzz's privacy failings.

This one will run and run: "Now Google has confirmed to Mashable that it has never indexed the “@” symbol. In other words, the search engine has never recognized a Twitter handle when it was formatted that way.

"So while a search for “WWE Twitter” still returns the organization’s Twitter feed before its Google+ page, “@WWE” returns the same results as “WWE” — in this case, with Google+ results first. Somehow a search for “+WWE” succeeds in returning a Google+ profile.

"But really, Google? The company with a car that drives itself? In more than five years of people searching for Twitter handles, you never got around to adding the @ symbol to your index?

"Even without the @ sign being indexed, however, the concern over the results for “@WWE” are valid: about 24,900 people have +1ed or added WWE to their circles on Google+ — but 792,642 people follow WWE on Twitter."

Steven Levy was pretty much embedded with Google to write his book In The Plex, so he has a special view of its changes to search in the US: "there is a risk to proceeding on this path. The company has spent its entire corporate life protecting the integrity of its search product. When writing In the Plex, I learned that the secret behind Google’s somewhat bland design was that if Google looked like it was designed by a machine, users would implicitly understand that Google search itself was unpolluted by strong opinions. Google meticulously positioned its flagship product as a neutral judge of what was relevant to the user.

"Search, in short, should appear to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach. When using its algorithmic wizardry to deeply integrate social information into its search experience, it behooves Google to avoid even a whiff of bias. With SPYW, though, the odor is unmistakable. No matter how you cut it, the search engine now increases the value of participating in Google+. It may be Google’s right to do this. But it also may turn off a lot of users. And it also provides ammo for Google’s detractors, including those in Washington."

Shows Google+ to be about half the size of Twitter in the US in terms of unique visitors, and with people spending one-fifth of the time. When compared to Facebook, it gets one-tenth the visitors and they spend 1% as much time there.

But Google+ sits right next to Google's crawler, so obviously it's more relevant for search results than the public networks that people actually use.

Matt Cutts of Google uses his personal blog to defend the usefulness of Google's decision to push Google+ rankings miles above where they would otherwise appear (if based on, say, number of external links).

But the commenters, who are polite and reasoned, simply don't seem to agree with him. At all. Even Danny Sullivan, the search engine expert who is usually a great supporter of Google, is unhappy (his comment is in there).

Jon Mitchell, who is responsible for reporting on Google+ at RWW, doesn't like the way it lets people snarf entire articles to repost them (even seen Facebook, Jon?), the lack of permalinks, the shoehorning of Google+ profile pictures into search results, the shoehorning of Google+ posts into search results, and… quite a long list, actually.

Hitwise has the data. That's a lot of visits (and likely excludes mobile, because Hitwise operates via ISPs).

The point about searches for it is that many people do a search to find a site - even if you would imagine that they would type in the URL directly. If fewer people search for something, that often means that they're not going there as much. (Seriously: Google processes a colossal number of searches for "Facebook" and "Twitter".)

One potentially confounding effect: the introduction of apps on smartphones might mean fewer people need to do a search on those to get to them.

MG Siegler, whose profile picture on Google+ in which he was extending his middle finger (offensive? Maybe in the US) was deleted, points out that Michael Arrington's default picture if you search for images of him show Arrington… extending his middle finger.

"So the rules seems to be that if you want a middle finger picture to be the image associated with you, too bad. Or if you don’t want a middle finger picture to be associated with you, too bad. Heads, Google wins. Tails, Google wins. 

"We’re seeing some of the problems with Google’s expansion to do everything on the web. Some of their policies in certain places seem to directly contradict their policies elsewhere. And there’s no easy solution. As a result, these types of debates will continue."

This has spiralled from being trivial to being very important.

"The quality of conversations on Google+ is something we take very seriously, so we’re happy to announce that we've finished rolling out our new comment spam moderation system.

"Now, if we identify a possibly spammy comment on your post, we'll immediately mark it for your review."

If Google+ is getting spam that's actually a good sign - spammers don't bother with places where nothing is happening. But you have to review your own? Bet that people won't, for the most part.

"In November, Google+ social media referrals have dropped again. Facebook now has over 1,000 times the amount of referrals as Google+."

For reference, Facebook has about 80 times more users than Google+.

Might this mean though that people are using Google+ differently - to discuss within the network, rather than following links, rather as happens on Twitter? (In these stats, Twitter has about eight times as many referrals as Google+ - which is about in line with their respective sizes.

From Friday: "Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the world's first computer programmer and to share inspiring stories about women working in science, technology and math. Surely some of the most significant technical work done by women since this day last year includes the creation of what is said to be the fastest-growing social network in history, Google Plus."

Twenty minutes after this appeared, Sergey Brin uploaded a picture of a giraffe.

"A report by the Atlantic shined a light on a new “social media service” which allows users to purchase Google +1′s in bulk.  The site in question, Pluseem, has a variety of different Google+ package sizes, from 50 plusses to 2,000, with the prices ranging from $0.18 – $0.38 per plus."<br />
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Breaking Google's quality guidelines, as you could guess. But - the presence of spam shows an ecosystem that spammers think worth chasing. 

Andreas Kluth of The Economist: "Tell me: In real life, how often do you walk up to somebody and request to be “friends”, then begin “sharing” pictures of your naked baby?<br />
"How wonderfully warm and fuzzy do you feel when somebody (oh yes, wasn’t he on my soccer team 30 years ago? Or perhaps I vomited on him at that keg party in 1989?) stops you on the street, asks to be “friends”, then shares his baby pictures with you?<br />
"Mark [Zuckerberg] has been asking us all to do exactly this sort of thing. I thought it was strange back then, and I said so in our pages. (The picture at the top of this post is from that old piece.) But — did I mention? — that was in 2007. A different era, as I said."<br />
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He likes Google+ and Circles, however.

"It is even worse than it appears for Twitter. The Google+ APIs are coming. When that happens, third-party Twitter clients will start baking in Google+ integration, especially because Twitter has been kicking their developers all year.<br />
"What does Twitter do in response?<br />
"Do nothing? The bleeding increases. Backbone users, after all, are big fans of third-party clients.<br />
"Kick developers who dare to integrate with Google+? That sounds like it would generate a devastating backlash.<br />
"Buy more clients / pay developers to favor Twitter? That doesn’t sound sustainable.<br />
"Alternatives?"<br />
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The difference, though, is that an app for Google+ will need to be able to show the huge amounts of verbiage and comments that people add to it. Tolerable on a smartphone, but not so easy - oddly enough - on the desktop.

Neat add-on for using Google+ in Chrome.

"It’s week two of Google+ mania, and the new service from Google seems more than a shot across Facebook’s bow, now it appears Google is actually landing blows. As one person (not an Internet insider but savvy nonetheless) said to me: “I’m tired of Facebook, and I love Google’s circles…am I crazy?” Apparently not. So, does Google have a hit on its hands? And is Facebook threatened? Well, yes, and no. Yes, Google has a hit on its hands, but let’s remember Orkut was a hitfor about two months as well. And no, for now, Facebook is still the one to beat. But you can bet the folks at Facebook are sweating their next move(s)."<br />
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Facebook's reaction to Google+, if it comes, will be interesting indeed. Though Facebook Groups arguably do what Circles do.

"This is something Nik Butler and I have discussed.<br />
"Google needs to let people choose which circles to follow.<br />
"I imagine a UI which allows me to set a circle as private (“Work”, “Family”, “Political ranting”) and set some circles as public (“Kitten pictures”, “Industry News”, “Political thoughts”).<br />
"When you follow me, you can say “I hate kittens, but I love politics – I’ll follow one circle and ignore the others.”<br />
"At the moment, I don’t have the time to categorise 200 people into what I think they’re interested. And they don’t want to be bombarded with QR codes when all they really want is LOLCATS.<br />
"So, come on Google, sort it out – let people choose which circles they want to be in.<br />
"Please RT!"<br />
<br />
The irony of that final request being offered for Twitter not lost, we hope.

"The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public."<br />
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How about profiles that are pseudonymous?

Stephen Shankland: "Here's an interesting illustration of the professional-personal situation. Bradley Horowitz, the Google vice president in charge of Google+ and other social and communications products, just announced his engagement publicly on Google+. Google+ makes it easy to keep that sort of post more private if desired, but it lacks an inverse mechanism that a fiancee might want, a way to filter out her fiance's public, professional comments and just get the personal.<br />
"One obvious solution to this plight involves the Venn diagram approach to circles--a thought that's occurred to me and several others. Simon Phipps would like nested circles, so he could have a group that's a subset of another. Another handy possibility would be the union of two sets--family members in the local neighborhood, for example. But the one that would solve my biggest problem would be an exclusion: I'd like a message to be sent to all those people who follow me except my non-nerdy friends and family."

"Because the folks you add to your Circles are not in on the taxonomy you are using, there is no shared context: it’s not a little cocktail party where all the guests are aware they’ve been invited, and know who the others are. It’s a one-sided filter, and so no shared context or conversation can arise. Circles are like cutting out pieces of books by different authors, pasting them together, and pretending it happened at a salon.<br />
"I think Circles might be helpful on a different level. Imagine if I could use Circles as insta-context for other tools, though. If I could create a Hangout limited to Social Tools Maniacs, for example, or a Huddle involving Big Thinkers (as defined by me). Then the point of a Circle would become evident operationally to the circle of people invited, and the object and context of the discussion becomes shared.<br />
"Until tools can use Circles, I think they are just a filtering device: useful for some, but pedestrian."

"Despite a positive early reception to the service, the big challenge for Google+ isn’t pleasing users in its first few days, it’s finding a solid place for it in their lives in the long term. What will that place be? At present, it’s difficult to say. Looking at the currently big social networks, they fit into a few core categories:<br />
• Sharing and communicating with friends: Facebook, Hyves, Orkut etc.<br />
• Sharing quick thoughts, news and opinions: Twitter<br />
• Business-focused networking: LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo etc.<br />
"So where does Google+ fit into this? It manages to sit across all these verticals. The use of ‘Circles’ to organise friends and contacts means you can share business-focused information with your colleagues and photos of a night out with your friends in the same place without too much fear of them crossing over into the wrong audiences. The big question is, can Google convince a groundswell of people to make the switch from their existing social networks?"

Gina Trapani: "After a half day of using Google+ with the limited number of people I know in the field test so far, I like it a lot. I will love Google+ when and if all my friends show up and stick around.<br />
"I've been been watching Google flail around social web apps for a few years now, so what I appreciate most about Google+ is that it's a well-thought out product informed by past experience. The more I use Google+, the more I see just how many lessons Google learned from Wave and Buzz.."