Tim Bray: ‘Things About Google+’

Good points from Tim Bray on Google+.

Something that occurred to me over the weekend is that Google+’s name suggests that this is a major initiative from Google. “Google” has always meant two things: the company, and its flagship product, the search engine at google.com. Google offers many products, but its main product has always been search. Adding a “+” — not the word plus but merely the punctuation character — strikes me as perhaps the most aggressive way that Google, the company, could attempt to redefine what “Google” means to the public at large. If it works out as they hope, the result is that we’ll wind up thinking of this social network at least as much as we do about web search when we think of “Google”.

★ Tuesday, 5 July 2011