The update also adds the "What's Hot" stream, which highlights popular posts from around Google+, already available on the mobile Web version. There's also a funky feature that lets users send feedback to Google+ by shaking the phone.

We called Instant Upload Google+'s killer feature because of how much easier it makes photo sharing. Apple's own iCloud instant upload feature has a 1,000 photo limit, but this allows unlimited uploads to Picasa albums. It was a secret weapon for Android before, but now iOS users get the benefit as well.

The photos are uploaded to a private album, so only you can see them until you decide to share to Google+. The advantage is that you don't have to wait for the photo to upload when you share; it just changes the status from private to shared.

You can download Google+ for iOS from the App Store.

Yesterday, Google TV's Facebook page seeded that a big announcement was coming. When Peter Kafka revealed that this YouTube app was it, he concluded that it was no big deal. But as far as Google TV goes, the YouTube app is big. YouTube is the new television. It's smart TV's killer app. But YouTube is not exclusive to Google TV. If Google TV wants to be relevant, it has to offer the best YouTube experience around.

YouTube was redesigned around topical channels and social networks in December. 2011 was a humongous year for YouTube. It racked up over 1 trillion views. YouTube also worked on major content deals with pro sports leagues and Disney movies last year. This year, YouTube was the venue for an online campaign stop by President Obama. It's starting to eclipse television.

So why is Google TV, the tip of the spear in Google's march into the living room, lagging behind?

Eric Schmidt made some hefty promises about the next year of Google TV. "By the summer of 2012, the majority of televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded in it," he said in December.

Right now, there's one integrated Google TV set on the market, the Sony Internet TV, and there are two set-top boxes. It's supposed to be the beachhead to bring Android into the living room, but only 8% of Google TV apps out there have been downloaded from Android Market. The rest came pre-installed on the device. Google TV owners aren't using the "smart part."

Thus far, Google TV has been plagued by performance and UI problems. It's even missing important video content. The YouTube experience has to be first-rate, but that's not even the platform's biggest challenge. The hardware sucks.

Logitech stopped making its Revue Google TV set-top boxes after losing more than $100 million on them. CEO Guerrino De Luca called it a "mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature."

But this month, Google asked the FCC for permission to test a secret, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled "entertainment device." It sounds like the existing Google TV products are just a beta test for Google's hardware ambitions. This year, there will be a smart TV showdown between Google's beta and Apple's "hobby".

Do you have an Internet-connected TV device? Which one(s)? Is it competing with old-fashioned TV? Share your living room tech setups in the comments.

The volume slider came out in December to let users adjust the prominence of posts from individual circles in their overall streams. It's now available for the What's Hot feed as well, which is where Google+ shows users popular posts from across the network.

What's Hot is a way for Google+ to make sure its users all see the big news on the network. It also helps users discover new content, as well as people and pages to add to their circles.

For a real-time social network, amplifying trends to all users is a way to ensure that big stories get maximum attention. On Twitter, for example, the whole service has been recently rearranged around the "discover" tab, which highlights trending topics and hashtags. This is also a tempting place for paid promotions.

Trending topics are not always (read: almost never) pretty, though. Fortunately for users, Twitter has shunted most of this madness off into its own tab. Google+ puts What's Hot posts prominently into the main stream. But today's update will let users turn the volume of What's Hot down, or even all the way off.

You can access What's Hot from the left sidebar, underneath your circles, or from plus.google.com/hot. When the volume slider goes live for you, it will appear in the top-right corner of the stream.

Flame graphic courtesy of Shutterstock

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

By doing things this way, Facebook, Google et al. can lend your name to things without really asking you, like ads and promotions of various kinds. You have implied your permission by "liking" things or "checking in" to places.

But you didn't create the ad. You just initiated an action that triggered it. Social applications that speak for us this way are using our identities without us.

Identity Is Prismatic

Our Facebook and Google identities are like constellations. The stars are our actions on the Web. Facebook and Google are on the ground, staring up at the sky with a bunch of marketers and advertisers. They're the know-it-alls pointing at abstract shapes and confidently labeling them with names.

But the actual user, not the vague constellation of her online actions, is a multi-faceted person. "Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole says, and "Facebook and Google do identity wrong."

"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole says. In other words, we're only presenting one, Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook. The advertisers who make Facebook possible don't have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature.

Today's Social Web Is a Performance

The more about ourselves we share with Facebook, the more stars you can see in the night sky, the clearer the constellation appears. Hence, Facebook rolls out Timeline and asks us to share our entire life story.

But what Facebook has to acknowledge is that this is still a performance. It's a make-believe Facebook self. And Facebook's (and Google's) business consists of spinning that self on our behalf, mapping it and stereotyping it and selling it.

It's not wrong of Facebook or Google to do that, per se. But I have a feeling that better products, better ads, and a better Web would be possible if users owned their identities, showing as many (or as few) facets as they want to show.

A Proposal: Online Identity as a Fingerprint

Users should have signatures that are truly theirs, instead of their Facebook and Google guardians signing on their behalf.

Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized. We should also be able to withhold it whenever we choose and make the content anonymous.

We should also be able to sign multiple and pseudonymous identities, but we'll have to hash that out later, as a political issue, once this is even technically possible. The first step is to create a protocol that lets us sign off the bits we've written as being of us, so that they remain identifiable no matter where the content is repackaged or republished.

Why Do We Want This?

We want this because it would delineate a difference between something we made or we said and something an outside service extrapolated about us.

We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn't sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.

Facebook and Google can only make enough money from their profiles of us by tracking our activity and extrapolating who we are and what we do. But that would still be possible on top of a layer of authentic identity that those services didn't own. They would be able to compete based on whose recommendations were more accurate, but there would be a layer of protection between who we declare we are and who companies assume we are. We would no longer be tied to just one of those identity constellations.

OpenID is not what I'm talking about, either. It's more than just logging in to websites. This is something we write in. It's not a handle and a password. It's like one of those wax seals on a letter, except with Information Age security measures.

The Naïve Things About My Idea

Many things about my above proposal are naïve. Here are just a few:

1. I am not well-versed enough in the longstanding projects of this nature that already exist, like GnuPG signing or Mozilla's BrowserID, to know what the challenges are. But I'm working on it.
   
2. I haven't specified at which layer of the user interface this identity signature should take place, whether at the device level, the browser level, or what. Again, that's because I am not well-versed enough in the technical requirements of such a project.
   
3. And yes, the inertia of moving away from siloed Web identities (Google/Facebook) towards this is unconscionably humongous.

So I know there are experts on these problems out there. Talk to me. What's right and what's wrong about this idea? Who's working on it? How is it going? Is it impossible? Is it unnecessary? Is it hopeless? In the interest of a better Web, let's talk about this.

See also: Scott M. Fulton, III's year-end post, "Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity?"

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The black bar, sometimes called the "sandbar," only appeared in the middle of last year as Google began to redesign its interfaces, and the gray Google Bar was launched in November. Some users still have the sandbar, and others have the gray one. Now there's a strange hybrid appearing, and it's sort of the worst of both worlds.

The black bar worked because it was simple. The text links were clear, and the important services were all easily visible, with a drop-down at the end for the rest. It wasn't pretty, but it was inoffensive and functional.

The gray Google Bar was more visually intensive. When Google introduced it, it sounded like the point was to give the user back some space by removing the black band at the top. The gray bar contained a search box for the Google service you were currently using, and to navigate to other Google apps, you used this crazy dropdown menu:

The icons helped, but it still wasn't fast to navigate, because you had to open the drop-down menus.

What we've got now is some kind of hybrid. The search box is still there, but the black bar is back now, too. Instead of the drop-down under the Google logo, it's among the text links at the top, and the drop down is just a list of black words that descends in the middle of the screen.

This inconsistency is starting to get crazy. Google's navigation bar gets a lot of use, and it's impossible to form habits with it constantly changing. The changes are inexplicable, too. Now the Google Bar is bigger than ever, but it doesn't seem any easier to use.

What do you think of Google's new, new Google Bar?

It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can't handle. It won't look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.

Many of Google's recent browser-based updates have pushed the envelope on hardware performance. For example, in October, Google released 3D views in Google Maps that use WebGL, so lower-end GPUs can't display them. Even some relatively new laptops can't handle WebGL. The new SwiftShader capabilities in Chrome will bring some these 3D graphics to less capable systems.

Other recent Chrome releases contained advanced audio APIs and the ability to run native code inside the browser. Others focused on speeding up page loads by pre-caching pages. Chrome engineers are even building new image formats to push the Web forward. These uncompromising updates were moving pretty quickly for a while, so the next version of Chrome will let older computers catch up.

If you feel like testing Google's browser capabilities as soon as they come out of the shop, jump in the Chrome beta channel.

Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.

Google already has a browser-based file system, Google Docs. It originated as a sort of word processor in the cloud, but it can actually handle and store many kinds of files, such as PDFs, JPEG images, MPEG audio and video, and it'll handle pretty much anything containing text. That does make it a pretty compelling stand-in for Dropbox when it comes to simply storing files.

It even has a nice disk drive icon now, after last year's Google makeovers. Google Drive, indeed:

Are people already using Google Docs as a cloud drive? Spanning, a company that provides backup for Google apps users (not just Google Apps users; free customers, too), took a look into how thousands of people are using it, and it studied their use to better optimize its services. Consequently, it has some insights into Google apps users to share.

Spanning has found that over half of the files in their customers' Docs accounts were not Google Apps-created. They were PDFs, audio, video, photos and Microsoft Office files. By file size, non-Google files comprised over 85% of the stuff people stored in their Docs accounts.

So, at least for the use case of storing files, lots of people are already using Google Docs instead of Dropbox. What Docs does that Dropbox doesn't is allow users to create and edit certain kinds of files. If you use Google Docs as your cloud document service, you're probably using it to make and work on documents, too. That's more than Dropbox can offer, standing on its own. (We'll get to apps built on top of Dropbox in a minute.)

Search, plus Your World

There's a new Google product that didn't exist last time the Google Drive rumors surfaced. It's Google. Or rather, it's Google+. On January 10, Google revealed Search, plus Your World, which threw everybody for a loop. If you don't understand that Google+ is the user-centric backbone of Google itself now, it doesn't make sense that this one side of Google search has stuff from this weird social network in it.

While this early stage of Search+ is definitely about putting Google+ in users' faces, that's not what the message is. "Your World" does not consist solely of YouTube videos shared on social networks. Google's personalized search also tries to figure out what a search means to you, so it can return something more meaningful. It's two modes of search: Global mode searches the indexed Web, and personal mode tailors it to you.

How much more useful would this be if Google's personalized search had your files in it? If your Google Drive contained your documents and music and other local files, they could show up in your personalized search results. If you couldn't remember whether you read something online or in a document you downloaded, Search+ could find both. Now we're giving meaning to the "Your World" part.

Dropbox has search, but it only contains part of what you're looking for when you search "your world." It's more useful as one of many services in a third-party cloud search app like Greplin, which also logs into Google apps and searches across. Google's new social signals run through all its services now, so if it's in your Google cloud, Google search will find it, period.

Dropbox Is A Platform. It'll Be Fine.

Between Docs and Search+, whatever Drive Google eventually ships (whether it's in a few weeks or another X years) will have lots of unique capabilities that make it a different beast from Dropbox.

That's exactly the way Dropbox wants it.

Dropbox turned down insane amounts of money from Apple, because it didn't want to get rolled in as a feature of one integrated system. That's why iCloud doesn't work like Dropbox. Apple wanted cloud syncing that was just there, so users don't have to know where their files are. Developers in the Apple ecosystem can just hook into iCloud. Their applications become Apple-specific. In exchange, they get free marketing in the App Store, and if Apple is feeling generous it features their apps as the App Of The Week or something.

Dropbox said "no" to all that. It wants to be the next Apple or Google, and its valuation seems optimistic about that possibility. Apple's cloud is totally integrated with its devices, using hardware as the platform. Google's cloud is integrated with its services, using the Web as a platform. Dropbox is a platform.

Dropbox lets different clients on different systems read and write to it. Dropbox doesn't have a Google Docs because anyone can build a word processor on top of it. We can build a thousand word processors on top of it, and if they can all read the same file format, they can all work together. Dropbox's platform ubiquity is what it's all about, and that's why Google (and Apple) can't copy it.

Lead photo: AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com

The Google+ Platform Blog has been pretty quiet. Google SVP Vic Gundotra said in October that Google+ doesn't "want to make the same mistakes of others," - referring to Twitter - by opening the API too quickly to developers and then having to clamp down later. He said to look ahead to Google I/0 (since rescheduled for June 27-29) for major platform announcements.

Google made some of the Google+ API available last year, but the capabilities are still extremely limited. Applications can currently read the main stream as well as search, +1s and comments. This has allowed aggregator apps like news readers to start pulling content from the Google+ stream. There are also basic ways to extend video hangouts with applications.

But because developers don't yet have write access, Google+ is fairly isolated from the Web outside. The +1 button has become commonplace for sharing, but third-party applications that share easily to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and more still can't post to Google+. Once Google opens up more write access to other clients, third-party contributions to the Google+ ecosystem will start to get interesting.

Add Google+ Developers to your circles.

See also: What Google Plus Needs to Do to Win Developers' Hearts

Kansas City won this privilege over 1,100 other cities in March 2011. Since then, Google and the city have been surveying, planning, and eating "way too much barbecue," says Google's manager, Kevin Lo. Today, they start laying cable. A few months behind the Kansas side, neighbors on the other side of the river in Kansas City, Mo. will get the hook-up as well.

Fiber optic cable contains a bundle of glass fibers about the width of a human hair. The fastest Internet connection on record was established by researchers at the SuperComputing 2011 conference in Seattle. They were testing ways to share the enormous amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research. That connection reached 186 gigabits per second. Google Fiber is just 1 gigabit.

That's not too shabby, though. Verizon's FiOS network, which is among the fastest commercially available in the U.S., gets only 150 megabits per second. Google Fiber will be almost 7 times faster than that.

How Will Kansas City's Fiber Work?

Kansas City won the Google Fiber competition because it met all of Google's various requirements. "Our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community, and develop working partnerships with the local government, utility and community organizations," its FAQ says. "We believe we've found this in both Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri."

Lo says the network will use "thousands of miles" of cable. The backbone of the network will be built first, and then Google Fiber will be connected to homes around Kansas City. The cable work starts today after months of surveying and measuring, as well as some negotiations around how to use the city's utility poles.

The Kansas City Star reports that Google and the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities had some disagreement over how the network would be hung on the city's utility poles.

The Wyandotte County government wrote the plan with an unusual stipulation that Google would be allowed to hang its cables for free, using part of the poles typically reserved for utility companies to hang their own communication cables, not for third parties. Phone and cable companies typically use a lower part of the pole, and they pay a fee to do so.

The special installation for Google would also have required more specialized crews, so it would be more costly. The Star's source says that Google will opt to pay the regular fees like any third-party provider.

Google says the later stages of this experiment will reach over 500,000 people. Google has promised competitive prices for residential Internet service, but it hasn't been specific yet.

Why Is Google Becoming An ISP?

Google's not just doing this to collect Internet bills from homes. When the Internet gets faster, Google's whole business benefits. Google wants to test new, bandwidth-intensive "killer apps" to see what kinds of future services it can provide. But even for normal Web services, speed benefits Google. Put bluntly, the faster your Internet, the more Google ads you can see. That's why Google search and the Chrome browser are so dang fast.

Google refers to this Google Fiber project as an "experiment," so don't get too excited about 1-gigabit fiber in your neighborhood just yet (unless you're in Kansas City). But as Google said in its initial announcement, there are big implications for testing this out in the U.S. The country isn't even in the top 10 for average connection speed. Google wants to push U.S. Internet infrastructure forward.

As for Kansas City, with these kinds of speeds, there's sure to be a boom in next-generation Internet start-ups.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The post then goes straight to the list of Microsoft products to which Google users can switch: Hotmail, Bing, Office 365 and Internet Explorer. How are these products better for users' "own information" than Google? Well, they don't read it to target ads. What else do they do with users' information? No explanation here. "We've left the light on for you. :)", VP Frank X. Shaw writes. You have to hand it to Microsoft for being so forward, but by rushing to the sales pitch, this post misses a huge opportunity to be informative. Is that because the information might be more complex than Microsoft (and the press) would care to admit?

It then goes on to explain to the public that the reason people get to use Google's suite of products for free is because Google uses the data to target them for ads. What an astonishing revelation. Microsoft gives the disclaimer every critic of free Web services uses before assailing a new, user-unfriendly change: "To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve the quality of an advertising product. But, that effort needs to be balanced with continuing to meet the needs and interests of users."

That's a great talking point. But Google's response to this campaign is so easy to imagine. "We rewrote our 60 privacy policies to be one clear, human-readable document. This policy doesn't collect any new information." Or how about this one? "Google users can export all their data and be gone forever. How's that for 'maintaining control of your personal information?' Hey Microsoft, how's your partner, Facebook, doing with that?"

The blogosphere won't make that argument for Google. It has to pay for an expensive campaign, just like Microsoft is.

UPDATE 12:30 p.m.: Google has posted a response. It's a simple checklist of myths versus facts, and it saves the deepest cut for last:

• Myth: Microsoft's approach to privacy is better than Google's. [Microsoft]
• Fact: We don't make judgments about other people's policies or controls. But our industry-leading Privacy Dashboard, Ads Preferences Manager and data liberation efforts enable you to understand and control the information we collect and how we use it--and we've simplified our privacy policy to make it easier to understand. Microsoft has no data liberation effort or Dashboard-like hub for users. Their privacy policy states that "information collected through one Microsoft service may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft services."

We've always believed the facts should inform our marketing--and that it's best to focus on our users rather than negative attacks on other companies.

The sad thing is, there's plenty to critize about Google's new direction and its impact on users, it's just too complicated (and politically sensitive) for Microsoft to explain in an ad.

This is just a shady PR attack by Microsoft, and the press is buying it. Microsoft doesn't deign to inform its readers about Google's policy. It uses a few kumbaya words up front and then gets straight to the point: it's BAAAAD. But we've seen less spun talking points in the Republican presidential debates.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com

What do you think of Google's new privacy policy? Sound off in the comments.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

There are still some questions here, as there were in Twitter's case. As Google says, a takedown request will only affect the content at the TLD of the country whose government requests the takedown. Does that mean users in that country will still be able to access content at other domains? Obviously, Google can't be straightforward about that if the answer is "yes," so the fact that it doesn't explicitly say "no" sounds good.

In fact, it makes clear that users can specifically request a particular country's version of a Blogger site by using a "No Country Redirect" URL. If you request http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr," it will go to the .com (U.S.) version of the site no matter what. It sets a short-term cookie to prevent the browser from redirecting that blog to a local domain. Whether that version will be accessible within a blacked-out country is unclear, so let's test it!

Better Than Nothing (And Then Some)

The idea of Web companies complying with censorship requests sounds icky. But too many people gave knee-jerk objections to Twitter's policy last week without considering what it actually does. Both Twitter and Google (at least with Blogger) have found ways around censoring this content altogether while still complying with local laws. The content isn't lost. It's still accessible outside of that area. Blogger sites may still be accessible within some blackout areas if users request a different domain.

The alternative, in some countries, would be to block the entire service. There's no way that's good for free speech. One could argue that doing business at all in a country that supports censorship is wrong for a communication company. But then put yourself in the local users' shoes and consider which alternative is preferable. The shame here is on the governments who censor their people, not on the companies sneaking free speech past them however they can.

What do you think of Blogger and Twitter's new censorship policies? Sound off in the comments.

But it's not true. Everyone watching should have seen this change coming. Google executives have maintained for so long that their new direction is one unified Google product. The new policy doesn't track any new data. It doesn't change the user's settings. Users can still export all their data and leave Google forever. All this does is change perception.

It's Nothing New

Before, every Google service was a different website. After March 1, they'll all be treated as one. The old arrangement meant that each service had its own privacy policy. That doesn't mean it was more private. Google still tracked users. It still shared data from some of its services with others.

On March 1, the rules become much simpler: Google is all one thing. If you use it, it tracks your usage, it stores your data, and it uses your activity to personalize its services for you. Every single way in which it will do so is clearly laid out.

Today, members of Congress sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page about the policy. They said it raises questions about whether consumers can opt-out of the new data sharing system either globally or on a product-by-product basis." That is crazy talk. You opt out "globally" by not using Google. That's how privacy policies work. It's true that you can't opt out of the privacy policies for individual services anymore. You know what you can do? Stop sharing things you don't want tracked.

Reflexively Reacting

To make sure I wasn't crazy for thinking this way, I spoke to Colin Zick, a partner at Boston law firm Foley Hoag and contributor to its blog, Security, Privacy And The Law.

"From a legal perspective, I'm not seeing anything that's much different in what's being proposed to take effect on March 1 and what's in place right now," Zick says. "In particular, the language about sharing across services has been in [Google's policies] for a long time."

Zick points out that all the past versions of Google's privacy policies are on the website, and the last two versions offer line-by-line comparisons to the previous version. Zick expects that Google will do the same with the new policy once it's officially issued.

"What we have is not a reaction to a change in legal language," Zick says, "but it's a change in perception. ... People are just reflexively reacting to the idea that Google is big."

Google Is Not Off The Hook Here

There are perfectly good things not to like about Google's new direction. For example, its community management strategy for Google+ is broken. Its names policy is only designed around appearances. As long as your name looks "real" to robots and engineers, you can go nuts. But you still can't use a handle, nor can you use a pseudonym unless it's "established," and you can prove it with some form of identification.

"Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole so eloquently told us at Web 2.0 last year. Google (and Facebook) want to lock users into a single identity on the Web as far as their services are concerned. There's no question that Google's new direction is to be a bigger part of its users' lives.

You Don't Have To Like It

The idea of what Google is has grown. This month, Google unveiled Search plus Your World, its integration of Google+ social results into Web search. Google+ had already been integrated into YouTube, Gmail and so many other Google services. But search was the Google we used to know. The change upset people, myself included.

Google has been accused of breaking a promise about how it should work. Its founders used to pride themselves on the fact that Google search didn't favor its own services. Google has been scrutinized for years for backpedalling on that stance, but Search+ has been treated as a last straw. For people who don't use Google+, Search plus Your World doesn't work.

google social search - I hate this: mlkshk.com/p/BZOU

— David Jacobs (@djacobs) January 26, 2012

But this is the new Google. You don't have to like it. If you don't like Search plus Your World, you can opt right out. You can opt out of sharing browser history by using incognito mode. You can also opt out of targeted ads. You can't opt out of Google's new privacy policy, because that's how Google's business is going to work from here on out. The data you create anywhere on Google are available to the rest of Google. Google is one big service for better or for worse. You don't have to use it.

No One Is Making You Use Google

The new privacy policy changes the way it feels to use Google, but it doesn't change the way it works. What are people afraid of Google tracking? Their name and address? Their location? The contents of their email? Their Web browsing habits? Google already tracked these things. So does Facebook. So does everybody. These are things you choose to share with Google. Who said you had to use Google? It's not the power grid. It's not the sewer system.

You have a choice. You can choose between Google's new direction, an all-in-one, twice-a-day everything-service its executives want you to use like a toothbrush, or Google's competitors. There are plucky start-up search engines out there that might remind you of classic Google. Microsoft also has a social search engine, a free email service and a suite of cloud-based office software. Oh, you don't like them as much? Boo hoo!

Google is making its move. It's changing its nature. Some changes are bad, and other changes are good. Users who like the changes will be happy, users who hate them will be sad. Google offers more tools than anybody else to give its users control over their data. As it says in the overview of its new privacy policy, users who don't like the new direction are welcome to export their data and take it elsewhere.

What do you think? Has Google gone too far? Will you take your Web activities elsewhere? Share that with us in the comments.

In a telling display of Google's new unified product approach, the Google Earth annoucement encourages users to "upgrade to Google+." Google wants to be considered all one service, and a Google+ "upgrade" spans across all its sites and applications.

Download Google Earth 6.2 here.

What do you think of Google integrating all its services? Sound off in the comments.

This policy change comes with new safety features for teen users. They will get a warning pop-up before posting publicly. Only people in teens' circles can contact them by default. If a stranger joins a Hangout in which a teen is participating, the young person is temporarily removed and asked if they want to rejoin.

Google+ also launches a new Safety Center today with more information on these changes. "Our approach is straightforward," Horowitz writes. "Build awesome features that teens really want, encourage safe behavior through appropriate defaults and in-product help, and make abuse reporting tools easy to find and use."

A bunch of celebrity and brand pages focused on teenage users also launch today including +Nickelodeon, +GLEE and a bunch of other things we've never heard of.

This announcement comes on the heels of some major changes to privacy and identity on Google+. This week, Google has updated the real names policy to allow "alternate names" and "established pseudonyms." Google's motivation behind its naming policy is to establish a trustworthy environment populated by apparent real people. The thinking was that users with "handles," like jon992381, would be less accountable for their actions. Google has since found that it's not quite that simple, but it maintains its policy of requiring users to at least appear to be real human beings. Whether this actually makes the environment safer for teens (or anyone) is up for debate.

Google also replaced its more than 60 separate privacy policies with one overarching policy for all Google sites. There are no opt-outs for individual Google services anymore. Using any aspect of Google should be treated as sharing data with every part of it. This makes privacy on Google simpler to understand, but it also raises the stakes for users. Thorough explanations of Google's new policies can be found in its new Safety Center.

Unfortunately, our do-it-ourselves recording didn't work out, or I'd post the whole thing. Maybe our new friend Vic can talk to somebody and get us On Air capabilities, so we can record (winky face). I promise we'll use it. I'd love to do this again. I'll do my best to recap how it went and what we learned.

Robert Anderson started us off with a great question about search. Google+ has changed the way search works by incorporating personalized results, and, as Robert pointed out, Google used other personal signals before all this, such as location and browsing history. How is all this affecting the Web?

I think there was consensus in the Hangout that global and personalized search are both important for different reasons. As Ashwini Gore and others said, we don't always want our friends' daily activities popping up in our searches when we're trying to get work done.

I mentioned that I'm often searching for news articles for work, and between personalized search and Google's recent "freshness" tweaks to the search algorithm, personalized search makes it hard to find old or obscure pages.

But Robert Redl shared the way he uses the Search, plus Your World features, and he had some ingenious suggestions. He uses private Google+ posts, shared only with himself, as little notes or reminders, which he can now easily find when he searches Google. The search features that put Google+ ahead of other social networks have caused an uproar in the blogosphere. But as Robert demonstrated, there are ways in which Search+ is a huge benefit to Google+ users.

Personally, I don't use Google+ for much more than submitting articles to the Googleverse, so Search+ is not that useful to me. My social graph lives elsewhere. But that's okay, because we can turn it off. Many users won't though, so social search will change what they find through Google.

We talked about how Google+ affects search engine placement, and Daniel Fontaine said it has helped his business. I think that's great. Search, plus Your World has changed SEO, but it has made it into something that users can control.

For the 19 of us who hung out, the ways we use Google+ as a "social network" varied. Some love it, some hate it, others will wait and see how it goes. People debate whether Google+ "counts" as a social network, or whether it's an "identity service," or whatever. One thing is for sure: Hangouts are AWESOME!

"Social" is surely a word we use too much on the Web. What could be more social than a bunch of people hanging out face to face? There were no "+1s" or "likes" going on in there, just words and body language. I don't have to like the Google+ interface, or the way its comment threads work, or even the way it affects search results to love what just happened.

We may argue about Google+ user statistics, whether it has umpty million users, whether they're "active" or not. We may argue about whether its new, overarching privacy policy is evil and terrifying or easier to understand and not that different. But I'm getting bored of that, aren't you? If you hate Google, don't use it. But I really recommend trying a Hangout. You'll smile a lot.

We should hang out sometime!