Perhaps it’s not the most exciting news in social media land, but I think it’s certainly some of the stealthiest.
Google+ has just announced ‘restricted communities’ to complement ‘restricted posts’. Not particularly glamorous, but what it does do is open the doors for enterprises to start adopting the tool internally, safe in the knowledge that restricted information would be much less likely to breach the corporate firewall.
It also gives Google potentially huge amounts more sensitive corporate data to crawl over and index, but that’s another thing entirely.
I still think G+ will be big (especially behind the firewall – something the Altimeter crew have picked up on too). Hangouts are the future for customer service imho. And Google’s recent change to YouTube commenting – meaning you now need to have a G+ profile and can’t post anonymously (there goes Adam Buxton’s Bug comedy set) will bring even more people into the G+ fold – in many YouTubers cases kicking and screaming…