Old timers may remember that in the early days of UUCP the ! exclamation mark (also called the bang path) was used to designate the address route from a sender to a receiver. It was common practice to tell someone you could be reached at site!foovax!machine!username.

The @ (at-sign) superceded the bang path and was for years associated with an email address (i.e. user@domain). Then Twitter came along and adopted it as a designator for an individual (ie. @twitterhandle). Along the way Twitter also turned the # (hashtag) into a common designator for a topic abbreviation.

Google’s Plus service has just opened its doors and you can guess at the scope of Google’s ambitions by the way they’re using one of the most common punctuation marks: the + (plus sign). This is used throughout the service as a designator for a user profile. In a note posted to the Plus service Andy Hertzfeld references a number of his colleagues that also worked on the Plus service.

Notice how links to an individual’s profile are shown. There is ubiquitous use of the + character through other parts of the service as well:

Even the URL for the service gets in on the act: http://www.google.com/+

It’s obvious this is a conscious choice on Google’s part to create a strong association and help adopt the letter for itself. You’ll know the grab has been successful when + First Lastname starts popping up on business cards the same way @username started showing up with no explanation needed.

To complete the process Google will have to take two more steps:

1. Allow a Google profile to have a real name instead of the current numeric designator. My Google profile is: https://plus.google.com/100474999684775059354. It should be https://google.com/+/ramin firoozye or at the very least https://plus.google.com/ramin firoozye. Naturally, there will be contention for common names, but that’s an unavoidable problem on just about every service. Both LinkedIn and Facebook support shortened URLs with names pointing to public profiles.
2. Modify the Google search engine so names prefixed with a + are automatically looked up in the Google Plus or Profile service. The Google search box is everywhere. It should be easy to look someone up by simply entering +name in the search box. This might be a little tough since + is also a boolean operator in the Google search world. But they could make an exception for a single-word search if it starts with a +.

It looks like the we’re in the early stages of the battle of the profiles. Trying to own the + sign is a smart move. Watch for other services as they try to mark their territory on the keyboard.

I’ve got dibs on?ramin.

But here’s the kicker.

If you do a page search for the unique term, sometimes the only place the term occurs is inside the Google Ads injected into the page!

Let’s walk this through.

The Google search spider comes knocking. It scans the entire page on a site and indexes it — ads and all. A while later you come along and do a search which leads you to look at the page. There’s nothing relevant there except for the irrelevant ad Google Ads stuck in there as filler when its own spider stopped by to scan the page.

By looking at the page, you the user got nothing of value. Google got (at least) two page view hits. One by its own spider and one by you being led there by the search — to someplace completely unrelated.

I bow before the brilliant recursiveness that is integration of search and advertising.