image source: Google+

BY EVAN THOMAS

ANCHOR LAUREN GORES

You're watching global multisource video news analysis from Newsy.

Google launched Google+ Pages on Monday, the latest feature for its social network, billing it as a way to connect with the people behind your favorite companies.

Until now, Google+ was for individual users only. Google actually shut businesses out until Pages was ready to go. Google+ vice president and product manager Brad Horowitz explains.

“...brands and businesses and bands, they go where the users are. So immediately, unexpectedly, we had all these businesses clamoring to get on. And we actually made the hard decision of kicking them off. It was rather brutal. They were offended and wondering why we would kick them off our service. The reason why is we wanted to do something really special, that was good for the brands and businesses, but also great for users. And so that’s what we launched today.”

The Next Web says-- Google’s moving forward. Google+ Pages could be more of a boon to businesses than even Twitter.

“Google has visibility that neither Facebook and Twitter has. ...Twitter should take notice if it hasn’t already. Today’s release of Google+ Pages shows a potentially long uphill battle for Twitter.”

But Computerworld says Google missed the boat. This brave new feature sounds exactly like everyone’s other favorite social network.

“Google may be touting its pages for business as “a leap forward in building relationships between businesses and people,” but let’s just say that’s a bit of a stretch, given that Facebook has had such pages for years.”

But MSNBC suggests such a comparison may be apples to oranges. Google has a massive, profitable ad network, but Facebook has half a billion daily users. That should make for healthy competition.

“Right now, Google’s got about $38 billion of revenue, and Facebook’s only got about $3-4 billion. So Google is much, much bigger. Advertisers flock to Google because people search a lot. But Facebook, the number of people using Facebook and the time they spend on Facebook, is rapidly exceeding the time they spend on Google. The other thing is, search doesn’t work in Facebook. Facebook has created this huge world where Google can’t penetrate, and advertisers have taken notice.”

The launch wasn’t without its stumbles, though. Robert Scoble points out on his blog-- company pages sure would benefit from more than one administrator.

“So, let me get this straight, only one person, working on one team, can post to a social networking account? Really? Google, did you really think this through?

Google asks its users to stay tuned. It says it has “lots of improvements planned” for the service.