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I’m just as surprised as you.

Why Is Google+ the Next Big Thing?

I’m not a Google insider, by the way, so this all comes from a passionate user’s seat outside the Googleplex. I know nothing more than most users. I have no secret in. What I do have, in abundance, is the ability to extrapolate and speculate, and that’s part of what fuels my answer.

First, the easy stuff. Google+ is a social network indexed by Google. In recent years, Google searched for ways to amplify the way humans pass links and data inside social networks, which is different than how one page references another page for a search. Stated more simply: Google+ is tied to Google search, so by using it well you can improve your primary website’s findability for folks searching for it.

Second, what’s probably the least obvious but most powerful part of Google+ is how much of it is built toward making it easy for people to discover you and connect with you, on the one hand, and how simple it is to choose to limit what you share and with whom you share on the other hand. When you choose to follow new people, you can see who follows them, and often, you can see who that person has chosen to follow. (And by “follow,” I’m talking about the act of opting to receive updates from someone inside of Google+.)

Facebook and LinkedIn are somewhat more closed. If I’m not your Facebook friend, you have to make special effort to see what I share on my wall. If we’re not connected via LinkedIn, you don’t receive updates from me. Twitter is more like Google+ from an inclusivity perspective.

Speculating on the Future

The reason I think that Google+ is the next big thing has less to do with the previous information and much more to do with speculating on where things might go. Google, over the past many years, has created several applications that don’t exactly line up logically. I think that with Google+, there is a huge potential to link together some of the disparate things, which can create some useful business applications from that linkage. Following are a few thoughts along those lines:

• Google Places enables businesses to add more information to search results. Integrating Google Places data into a Google+ business page means that your customers and prospects can have more information built into search results from Google, which can drive more potential discovery.

• Google Docs is a decent collaborative application, enabling you to create and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Adding the communications, sharing, and distribution powers of Google+ to Google Docs means that in-company workflow and collaboration has a new powerhouse tool.

• Google Calendar added event functionality on top of its existing meeting, appointment, and task functionalities. Posting events as a business inside of Google+ enables integrated scheduling and improved findability of events that matter to your prospects.

• Google Checkout is Google’s payment solution, which competes with PayPal and Amazon Payments, to name a couple. Integrating payment management into Google+ would permit businesses to execute transactions inside this social network without requiring the user to leave the Google+ ecosystem. (People might be more likely to complete a transaction that stays inside the social network.)

• Google’s Android mobile platform has many location-aware features, where your Google searches take into account where you’re located, and Google+ is built to accept, post, and share location data. Commerce and marketing options are huge in this “buy where you are” system. This isn’t so much speculation because the tools are already in place. It’s just up to you to use them as such.

• Google Analytics integration with business pages on Google+ means that not only do you understand the analytics of your primary websites, but now you also have visibility into how people on this social network find your information and what they do with it. This