Many people use it every day, and some will have it as their homepage, and from today there will be some minor changes that might affect you in a big way.
The first noticeable change is that users are greeted with a new navigation for Google’s other services. Rather than a series of text links at the top of the page, there’s a simple drop down navigation from the Google logo. The main services are all there for easy access and users can choose to see more if required.
Another change that might not seem a huge change as of yet, is that if a user is signed into Google+, they now have easy access to share content from within other Google services. Google Search, Google Image Search, Google Maps and Google News all provided me this option. I presume it will be rolled out to all of Google’s services as they continue to add familiarity between all of their services.
Now that Google+ is integrated with the majority of what Google has to offer, it will certainly be interesting to see whether the activity within Google+ can increase. Although, Google+ reached a large number of users in a short space of time, I have found that not a lot of people appear to be proactively using the service.
The next question I suppose is where do we think Google will be heading with this? We have already seen Google+ influence search results, and we have seen Google launch a similar launch pad to it’s services on the Apple iPad that almost give users of the iPad full access to what Chrome OS has to offer [1]. It wouldn’t be too far out to say that Google Chrome could offer direct integration with these new features, there are already a number of Chrome extensions that can offer enhanced functionality for Google+.
None of these changes will move Google away from it’s core focus to many users, but what they do offer are a slight nudge on the user to continue to stay in the Google circle and share your findings on Google+.
If you'd like to join us on Google+, then you can add us to your circle here.