Google+ Launches Pages, Opens Floodgates For Brands

Now Google+ Pages are officially launching, and it’s good news all around.
The first thing Horowitz did was to rattle off some stats: the service launched a little over 100 days ago, now has 40 million users and 3.4 billion photos uploaded, and has launched over one hundred new features. Not a bad start. Onto the Pages.

Google+ is taking another major step needed toward becoming a full-fledged Facebook rival: it’s launching Google+ Pages, which allow brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, and everyone else to establish a presence on the service. The product is a lot like Facebook Pages, but there’s one major difference: Google is baking some elements of Google+ Pages deep into its bread-and-butter search product.

It’s been a rocky road getting here. As you may recall, when Google+ first launched, Google asked brands and publishers not to create pages for their own sites, promising that there would be an official solution coming shortly. Not everyone heeded Google’s request (and, in hindsight, TechCrunch shouldn’t have either), but rather than apply its own rules, Google started making exceptions. A lot of people got upset, a new TechCrunch employee was spawned (and unceremoniously banned), and Google SVP Vic Gundotra later went on to say that the ordeal “was probably a mistake“.

Today, we find out why: when a user goes to Google and types in ‘+TechCrunch’, they’re asked if they’d like to add TechCrunch to one of their Google+ circles. If they say yes, then this behavior becomes automatic: I could type in +Harry Potter + Android and immediately start following the Pages for both of those pages, assuming they existed. Of course, this behavior isn’t exactly natural. But Horowitz points out that brands could start advertising it — it’s not hard to imagine a trailer closing with ‘+MovieTitle’, the same way they do with the ‘Like us on Facebook’ badges.
Google is describing this feature as Direct Connect to the brands it’s working with. If you want to set it up, you need to create your Google+ Page, then add a snippet of code to the associated official website of your brand (or publisher, or whatever). Once Google’s crawlers ‘see’ this code, which may take a while, the connection will be verified and users will be able to use the ‘+’ feature in Google search.
Update: Apparently only some users can create Google Pages for the time being — you can see if your account is enabled right here.

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