[ajkohn]

I covered Google+ in the piece. It's definitely a bit of an outlier. I see Google+ as two things:

1) A way for Google to get primary and active signals about user preferences to better personalize search results. (aka - make search better).

2) A way to break the monopoly Facebook had on social attention. The strategy only works if users are in places where Google has a presence. That's almost everywhere - except Facebook. So ensuring that attention doesn't pool and persist in a dead zone was important - and I think they've succeeded.