As mentioned above, one of the areas of this merger I’m most interested in is seeing how the “social” aspect of Google+ impacts reviews, Page rankings in Google (if there will even be “rankings” as we think of them now) and personalized search results. Given that Google+ is a social media platform, I imagine we’ll be seeing the “authority” of the reviewer have more influence on rankings and visibility. Furthermore, I’m cautiously anticipating the fall-out of merging Google Places and Google+ in terms of business listing accuracy. It’s a mess now and Google+ adds another layer of complexity.

Again, great post and thanks for making this happen.

Right now it’s not yet too exciting b/c all they’ve done is changed reviews to zagat and migrated the Google Places over.

It reminds a lot of Facebook’s timeline. I think it was smart for Google to tie in the local listings to their social platform. It’s no surprise, since they are tying everything to it.

You can see what you’ll be able to do with your Google+ Local listings if you look at their example listings they provided on their blog. I did a youtube video discussing those new elements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE-99mYMACo&hd=1

I like that Google+ Local listings will be indexed and that a small business owner will be able to add posts, videos, audio, images, etc to their listings. Businesses should be able to give quite the user experience to their clients/customers.

If I as a small business I’d get a Google+ account and create a business page and begin circling people and start engaging to build a active account, so you are prepped once they tie in your Google+ Page with your Google+ Local Listing(s).