Google+ is now available with Google Apps
Google Apps fans, today we're ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at college, at work or at home.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands four months after Google confirmed in July that Google Apps users would gain Google+ access, closing the gap between the consumer social network and the paid/collaborative Apps base at schools and businesses. It also answers the argument made in GigaOM's July piece on why Google+ could find a home in the workplace — that sharing organized around circles maps onto how colleagues already group contacts.
The move builds on Google's steady thickening of the Apps bundle, from full-featured Apps testing in 2010 to User Managed Storage in March 2011. Adding Google+ turns Apps from a set of discrete tools into a social layer attached to every work or school account.
First-order effects
- Google Apps users at college, work or home can now activate Google+ on their existing account, extending the network's reach from consumer signups into organization-managed accounts overnight.
- IT administrators who provision Apps accounts become the gatekeepers for workplace Google+ adoption, shifting distribution from individual opt-in to organizational rollout.
Second-order effects
- The Apps bundle gets a new selling point against rival productivity suites: an organization choosing Apps now gets enterprise email, docs and a social network under one admin console, raising switching costs for customers weighing alternatives.
- Google gains a workplace foothold its consumer-only launch could not provide — colleagues adopting circles for internal sharing pull in whole teams rather than lone early adopters.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Google account attached to work or school becomes the identity anchor across Google services, with the social graph following the professional account rather than a personal one — a structural bet on one profile per person spanning both contexts.
- Enterprise social networking drifts from standalone products toward features bundled into the productivity suite organizations already pay for, compressing the market for separate workplace-social tools.
The trend: Consumer social networks are being folded into managed productivity suites, turning the employer- or school-issued account into the primary online identity.