Earlier this month it felt like Google+ had become stagnant, but recently the feature set has been picking up again. Google Reader is now more tightly integrated (for better or worse), so is YouTube, and with the help of a couple new Chrome extensions you can +1 anything on the web and get notified of new posts even when you’re not using one of Google’s services.
The +1 extension is actually pretty neat. It displays the number of people who +1′d whatever site you’re currently browsing, allowing you to get a sense of how popular/good the article/site is. It also enables you to share anything you find on the web with a single click, and if you click a couple more times you can share the page with specific circles as well. It’s a bit strange that you have to +1 something publicly before you can share it with people privately, but if you hide the +1 section of your profile nobody should know the difference.
The notification extension works just like the little red number icon on Google’s pages, so that’s pretty useful as well.
The one Google “app” that hasn’t been integrated yet (and one that I think should’ve been included when Google+ launched) is Google Calendar. I’m sure it’ll come soon enough, but its absence was immediately noticeable from the day I started using Google+, and others probably felt the same way. Coordinating events via Facebook is really nice, but Google could take it a lot further with Maps and Calendar integration, and I’m just a bit surprised that they haven’t done it yet. Here’s hoping they’ll do that soon.