GOOGLE + NOW OPEN FOR BUSINESSES

Finally, Google is now allowing businesses, brands and any non-human entity to participate in its Google+ social network, through new Google+ Pages. Beginning today, and rolling out over the next two days, businesses will be able to create Google+ pages for themselves, using the Create A Page tool (and assuming you already have a regular Google+ account). once you gain access, you’ll be asked to create a page in one of five categories:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

At first, whoever creates the page initially will also be the page administrator. No one else will be able to admin that page after them, at first. Nor can that page be transferred to someone else. Multiple administrator support is promised in the near future, but until it arrives, it seems important that if your company has a social media manager, that person should be the one to create the account.

Unlike Facebook, there aren’t “vanity” URLs yet available that use a business name rather than a long string of number. The same issue is true of personal accounts. Google provided no update on when this might change. Don’t like the name of your page? Unlike with Facebook, you can change that at any time. However, if you have verified status, doing this will cause you to lose verification, requiring that process to start again

KINDLE SOFTWARE UPDATE GETS PAGE NUMBERS AND PUBLIC NOTES

It'll still be at least a few more days before it's automatically pushed out to Kindles around the world, but those looking to get a jump on things can now download an "early preview" of software update version 3.1 for the latest generation Kindle. That update adds a new public notes feature that lets you share your notes with others and view the notes of those you follow, as well as real page numbers that match the page numbers in the print version of a book -- those have already been added to "tens of thousands of Kindle books," and will also be hitting the various Kindle apps in the "coming months." You'll also get a new layout for magazines and newspapers that gives you a quick snapshot of the latest edition, and a new "before you go" feature that lets you rate a book as soon as you've finished it and share a brief note about it on your social networks. [Engadget]