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During the past week Google has been hosting their annual Google I/O event. Apple Events attract diehards from all over the world and in the past we have seen almost evangelical like scenes at these events. The annual Apple events always feature new products or updates to current offerings. Google I/O in the past have mainly focussed on what’s coming and some of that has never actually appeared.

There has been quite a few new innovations at this years conference, however the one I think will have the most impact for business is Google+ Events. There is no API for this yet, but once there is, I can see a world of possibilities.

Creating an Event in Google+
You simply login to your Google+ Profile and you will notice a New Events Tab on left side. Once you click on this you can create an Event. The first thing you will notice is to pick a theme (could be a property photo) or you can choose from a set of themes!

Events automatically added to Google Calendar
All events created by you will appear in your Google Calendar and you can also add photography to these events. Not only can you add photos in realtime (from an Android Phone), but others can too (that you invite to event) either in real time or after the event.

Google+ Circles Importance
If Google+ Circles were not important before, well they are now. You can build your list now and add circles for separate types of customers, current, potential, industry, friends, family etc. Google+ Circles are going to become increasingly important.

Google Events API
Once the API hits the market I am sure you will also be able to add events shortcode to your websites or develop systems for events to automatically appear with blog posts.

Google Hangouts
This is the sleeping giant and if you are not using Hangouts – you should. You can have discussions, experts and reviews right from a Hangout with up to 10 people. You can now even stream them live via Youtube and your own website via an embed code. With Google Events you can also schedule Hangouts right from the Google+ Event creation tool!

http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/events/

Ever since Google introduced Google+ to us a few months back we have seen a rapid acceleration in features both on Facebook and Google+, particularly on the personal front, whilst business pages and groups are being left behind.

Google’s Shame

The one thing that truly baffles me is how Google are treating it’s business customers. If you have a Google Apps for Business Account you would have noticed your Google profile and other services being migrated across to get ready for the slew of new features. After this migration you find you cannot have a Google Profile and you cannot access Google+ (and some other services with your username and password). Google inform the millions of paying Google customers that these features will be available soon.

I can see their reasoning (but only from their point of view) in getting Google+ to tens of millions of free users for beta testing, but to relegate your business customers who, incidentally, are the only ones who pay for Gmail, Docs, Calendars, Contacts etc, is well, nothing short of pathetic! You would be hard pressed to find another large company in the world who would offer new services in this manner! Business customers are angry and they will need to do something special to win back their hearts.

Facebook Accelerates

Facebook is going down the media path with music services, they have also updated their Chat feature to include videos and group chats, rebuilt their photo tools, viewers, added HD photos and rumored to announce movies – where you can watch together online. In fact over the next few months Facebook will add more new features than they have added in the past 3 years.

Business currently goes Missing

One group that has been left behind so far are Facebook Pages, the features are pretty ordinary compared to what you get on your personal profile! As an example – you cannot feed directly to your Facebook business page directly from your website, like you can do on your personal profile, it would not take a lot of coding to get this feature up, but it seems that Facebook is obsessed with Google+ on the personal level at the moment and with a looming IPO they do not want to head to a huge payday on the downward slide.

As for Google+, well the less said about this in its current form the better. Christian Oestlien, Google’s Group Product Manager, recently spoke on Google+ for businesses and said it was an oversight, yeah right Christian. I can assure you there would have been multiple meetings about this very subject and the heat you would receive on this, so we are left with open assurances and very little information.

Google CEO Larry Page has been taking the axe to many of the services Google offers that do not have widespread popularity and instead focussing on what he thinks will define Google over the next decade – Google will neglect business users at their own peril as they now number in the 10′s of millions. Luckily for Google is the reality that their Google Business accounts and services are pretty darn good and more importantly ingrained in the day to do minutia of what how we go about our business!

I personally think Google+ will be much better than Facebook for businesses when it becomes available? Why? Because Google already provides and we rely on so many of their services for our websites and day to day businesses, integrating all of this no doubt takes time, but once this is integrated, I feel that Google+ will dominate the business market. Not only that, I am sure Google+ for business will also be integrated into search results and other business services such as Google Places, Google Voice, Google Checkout, Adwords, Adsense, Google Analytics, Google Calendar etc. Many of these Facebook can ever remotely compete with, especially with many coupled with Google Search results.

Competition

We again learn the lesson of competition in the marketplace being good for consumers, the more robust competition, the better the features offered, the more ongoing innovation and of course the less money bled from our collective wallets.

For all of us in the business world, well, we just need Google to enter the business fray with Google Plus (later this year) and finally we will then see a host of new services on Facebook for businesses and the real fight will begin!