Google+ finally available for Apps - but with a warning for business

UPDATE Oct 28: The Google+ social network has finally been made available for Google Apps users (via an announcement on the company's official blog).

Google says Apps commercial users (most of whom pay $US50 per user per year), will be able to tweak Google+ settings so "you’ll also have the option to share with everyone in your organization, even if you haven’t added all of those people to a circle."

Your correspondent - Super Administrator of his one-man domain - immediately took advantage of the new option to turn on Google+.

He was met by a welter of warnings.

(Click to enlarge)

A Google disclaimer notes that people can use Google+ to share or export data outside your organisation (the same could, of course, be said of most social networking tools).

But the company also notes that Google+'s "Circles" feature includes the ability to share information with a discrete subset of your connections - in its official example, a work project team or friends who share a hobby:

Another qualification: Google+ is not covered by the Apps Customer Agreement, which includes service level guarantees.

So what happened? Initially, nothing. I still blocked. Google says it will take up to 24 hours for Google+ access to be granted. 

Sept 28: Google+, which was opened to the public last Wednesday after a (very broad) invite-only period since June 28, seems to be a runaway success.

By one count, it now has 43 million users, one third of them added in the past week. (Facebook claims 800 million, half of whom are actively daily.)

I’m not one of them.

I’d like to be.

But the thing is, Google+ doesn’t support custom domains, as used by many Google Apps Pro users. In my case, chriskeall.com and my associated email, chris@chriskeall.com.

That's bad news for Google Apps paying customers, which include NZ Post, Localist and the University of Auckland. "I want to use my corporate email address with Google+ but I can't," business-to-business social media expert Tom Skotidas told Keallhauled.

Support for custom domains is one of the key features of the commercial version of Google Apps (whose standard price is $US50 a year). For any organisation, or self-employed person (or self-promoting journalist), a customised domain is a flasher look than a standard gmail address.

Yet a Google Profile can’t be created around a customised email address

And without a Profile, you can’t register for Google+ (at least, not unless you want to abandon your usual corporate email address and start networking under a gmail moniker).

That's no good at a time when many business want to take advantages of social networking. And when Google+ offers potentially useful collaborative professional tools, such as using its "Hangout" feature for many people to work on a document at once.

"I feel your pain"
I the problem to Google’s Kiwi ex-pat engineering director Craig Nevill-Manning during an interview earlier this month, hoping there was some kind of easy workaround I’d missed.

Sadly, no.

“I feel your pain,” was all Dr Nevill-Manning could offer at that point.

I checked in with the doctor again earlier this week (the engineering director works on Google’s core search product, but is in a good position to keep tabs on other areas).

“I'm afraid I don't have a date for Google Apps users on Google+, but I'm told ‘soon’,” Dr Nevill-Manning emailed. We're actively working on it. I'm desperately waiting for it as well.”

Paying more, getting less
There's a lot to love about the recently spruced-up Google Apps, which includes online versions of Microsoft Office-style apps.

And the commercial of the service delivers extra benefits like a supersize mailbox, an uptime guarantee, and the aforementioned custom domains.

Yet Google Apps Pro is failing to integrate with some of the company's core products. YouTube is another example of failing to support custom domains - leading to the tiresome exercise of having to log-out of Google Apps Pro and log in via a separate Gmail account each time I want to access my settings, or post, on the file-sharing site (for a lot of posting I've defected to Vimeo).

It feels like I'm paying for more, but getting less.