Is Google Plus Social Network Ready For Business?

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc…Image via CrunchBase

Remember all those blog posts asking if Facebook would be ready for business? I’m not sure that was ever answered but it did give rise to business-oriented Facebook competitors including Salesforce.Com’s Chatter and Yammer.

Now I’m guessing that Google’s new Google+ offering will become a business question. With one day of experience under my belt I guess I am as much an expert as anyone else right now. Here’s my quick take.

1. The most obvious is that this is a Google product and interaction will take place outside the confines of corporate IT. The issues of compliance, privacy and security in corporate environments don’t go away here. Google+ is a lot more sensible in its approach of setting up groups at the start rather than Facebook’s trying to clean up the friend/family/business contacts mashup, but I’d like to see what Google can do to help work with business oriented users here.

2. Google+ and its use of Sparks, Hangouts andhttp://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html Huddles addresses a lot of the issues surrounding the mobile enterprise. Businesses have become dispersed and mobile applications have not caught up with the mobile world. Sparks, hangouts and huddles as a model for the new business apps in terms of making dispersed teams effective makes a lot of sense.

3. Google+ is mobile from the start. That is smart

Bottom Line: Corporate execs and tech execs need to jump into Google+ not so much as they will use it immediately in business but for the direction it sets in developing a new universe of mobile business applications.