If you are on Match.com, you may have seen the new Match.com verification system. This is an option that let’s you verify who you are by connecting to your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, even LinkedIn. Let us repeat that: on a dating site, Match, you connect to your social media accounts so people know who you are.

Today, Wednesday, July 10, 2013, there was a widespread Google outage, and Google was down for many people in the United States.

With all the hoopla over Google+ – what with some calling it the Facebook killer, and all – it is interesting to us to note that nobody has yet stopped to question what sort of advantage Google has over Facebook by being able to data-mine all of that email that flows from Facebook to its users, via…Gmail.

We’re betting that some in the Google inner circle are ruing the day that someone at Google HQ first uttered “Don’t be evil.” Like Bush’s “Read my lips, no new taxes”, it has become the iconic soundbite with which they are most associated. How that gels with the news that Google is now forcing anyone with a Google Profile to make that profile public or lose it, well, we’re sure we don’t know. But there it is: where users used to be able to keep their Google Profile private, Google has made clear that private profiles will no longer be permitted. Either take your Google Profile public, or lose it when they do a mass deletion of all private Google profiles on July 31st.

Google + or, as it is known more fully, the Google+ Project, is Google’s foray into creating a true social network. So what is Google+? As the awesome comic XKCD puts it, it’s like Facebook, but it’s not Facebook, making it a win-win, according to some.