Google’s long-awaited social project hasarrivedand it has been met with general approval from the early adopters. The promising new social platform opens up many opportunities for Google, and it can now tap into the lucrative social gaming industry. Whilst the likes of Facebook already have a solid footing in the gaming industry, it doesn’t mean that there’s no room for another platform to join in. In fact, given the fresh, unique take of Google on social networking, paired with its own mobile operating system, Android, and a micropayment system, social gaming is an obvious route for Google to go down....

It’s a well-known fact that Google is a generally wealthy company. Though I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting any of Google’s various headquarters, inside sources have revealed that the company hosts several cafeterias, gyms and other luxuries in its offices alone. Which is why I’m hardly surprised to hear that Google+ is not making revenue generation on the social platform a priority. With money coming in all over the place via AdWords and AdSense, Google+ has the potential to remain ad-free for years without needing to tweak the service....

Google hasjust introduceda new way of customizing Google+ so you only see content from people you’re interested in without having to completely block them. The Block Option From day 1, Google has provided a means of “blocking” people entirely from your Google+ experience. This would involve clicking “block” on their profile and it would result in: The Ignore Option Today, with the less intense “ignore” option. You can hide certain people that you don’t necessarily want to see but you’re ok with still having them interact with your content....

The Google+ gods are listening, and they have given us searchable hashtags. … Sort of. While surfing my merry little workaholic way through my main Google+ stream this evening, I noticeda postfrom Natalie Villalobos, Community Manager at Google+, pointing towards a hash tagged search on the platform. I did a double-take, of course, as just this past weekend, I wrotea rather lengthy postsuggesting how beneficial searchable Google+ hashtags would be on the platform, supporting it with comments and insight from the G+ community itself....

Although Google has done a pretty good job of implementingGoogle+into its portfolio of services, the search giant hadn’t implemented a solution that would enable users to see view their notifications without having to install a third-party extension like Surplus to display the number of replies, friend additions and tags on their account. It appears Google has added yet another small feature to Google+ to assist users with this problem, implementing a small tab notification count that displays the number of notifications a user has, as long as they have a Google+ tab or window open in their browser....