Google has released a new stand-alone app and unified communication platform for Hangouts. Now, Google+ users can initiate both text and video chats with other Google+ members at any time by launching a new hangout. For many, this has resulting in a bombardment of notifications from people wanting to chat, and attempting to launch chats with entire circles.

If you've joined a lot of Google+ communities looking for opportunities for discussion and to meet new people, you're likely a member of at least a few communities that either aren't active, or are not providing you with the valuable discussion you were looking for. These excess communities add to the total number of communities listed on your community page, complicating your ability to find and participate in the communities you're interested in. And posts to these extra communities show up in your Home stream and drown out the more interesting posts.

Just like when we cleaned up and reorganized our Circles, we need to do the same thing with Communities regularly if we're going to continue to gain value from the Communities and Google+.

One of the interesting features of Google+ is the Explore button. Clicking it reveals "What's hot and recommended" on Google+ (it used to be called "Hot on Google"). These are the posts that are trending, and in fact, to the right of your stream you will see a list of the Google+ hashtags and conversations that are literally trending. You can check out this feed any time you want, and control how many of these items get into your Home stream. But have you ever thought about what it takes to get into "What's Hot?"

Understand that having a post get into the Explore stream should be every marketer and small business owner's dream. Instead of your post being limited in visibility to people who have circled you, a post that shows up in What's Hot can show up in countless other people's streams, giving you potential exposure to millions of Google+ users.

One of the hidden gems within Google+ that a lot of long-time users still aren't aware of is Ripples. It's a powerful feature that is hidden within a drop down menu, so you may not have ever seen or noticed it. We will quickly walk through how to get to and understand Ripples, but more importantly, we're going to dig into some impressive ways to use ripples to benefit your business, and demonstrate yet again why Google+ is positioned to be your social network of choice.

In our Google+ Primer article, we briefly covered Google+ Circles and how they can be used to organize the people you want to be connected to. In today's article, we're going to go into more detail about these Circles. We will review what they can do, and how they can make your Google+ so much more organized and informative, and perhaps share a few secrets that only the most experienced Google+ users have found.

If you aren't yet using Google+, or aren't logging in regularly, the social network may seem a bit intimidating. It's different from Facebook in a lot of ways, and there are a number of features and nuances that may not be obvious how to use or what you're supposed to do. These are perfectly understandable stumbling blocks to using and getting value out of Google+. The thing is, particularly if you're in business, Google+ is rapidly developing as the premiere network!