What's In a Name: Google+ Is Your Plus One

Google+, the long-awaited and highly ambitious Circle-driven social network from Google, has a clumsy name. It’s a search-unfriendly and seemingly unfitting moniker for the world’s next great social network. So, why this bizarre name choice?

At launch, Google+ project co-leader Bradley Horowitz told AllThingsDthat the name denotes how the product will make every other Google product social. “It’s almost the smallest modifier on Google itself that you can imagine,” he said.

That small modifier carries one huge meaning. It’s not just Google any longer, it’s Google plus you, where Google becomes your plus one for the web.

A Plus One for Every Web Occasion

The plus one metaphor is an important one. Google+ follows you around the web and on mobile via an omnipresent and inescapable bar that includes a share box and notifications drop-down.

Now, Google+ is your plus one on most Google products: Search, Images, Videos, Maps, News, Gmail, Documents, Calendar, Finance and so forth. As Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook put it, “users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.”

And, if you think about it, the plus one analogy fits. A plus one in the offline world is a companion or a crutch for a social setting that would otherwise be awkward to attend alone. You probably wouldn’t go to a wedding, movie, dinner party, work function or couple-centric social gathering without a plus one.

As the digital world bleeds into the physical world and personal relationships migrate to the web, the never-go-without-a-plus-one philosophy is carrying over here as well.

Right now, we see it manifested in Facebook’s social graph and the relationships we bring with us when we login with Facebook on a website or app.

But many of us have grown weary of Facebook as our de facto plus one. Facebook, as a plus one, is a little too needy (with our information), a little too demanding (of our time), and it has lost the ability to really please us (with its never-ending stream) in the routine of each day.

For some of us, Facebook doesn’t make us feel special anymore. And so we get (and ignore) the barrage of messages, updates and friend requests, and we tend to “phone it in” more often than not.

Our Facebook fatigue has given Google an opening. Now, there’s genuine widespread interest in this new suitor, as evidenced by the demand for Google+ invites.

The excitement of our new relationship will soon fade, however, and in its place, familiarity or contempt will seep in. But Google+ can keep the spark alive — not with more features, but with feeling.

A Web of Feeling

The press loves story lines involving angst or animus. Google, frustrated in its social ineptitude and lack of foresight, is now on the offensive, and aims to take down Facebook, Twitter or anyone else that stands in its way. You’ve also likely read that Google+ does work for regular folks, such as your mom and dad, or that maybe it doesn’t.

You’ve seen these headlines, and while they all poke around the truth, they miss the plot — Google is trying to understand and capture human relationships as they act on and influence the behaviors of those of us who are willing to put real faces to our online names.