Google+ as a website and service is quickly maturing. It started invite-only and has since listened to users and expanded its service based on that feedback † . More recently, it opened itself up to the world—invites no longer required.
Since it is still a fairly new service and not everyone has yet migrated to it, I find I am always referring people to my page over there. In general, it’s not a big deal. I have a unique enough name and user icon that folks can find me if they search, but a direct clickable link is a little more straightforward and easier than saying “go here, then type this into the search.” And the big problem I have with Google+ user profile URLs is that they’re ugly. They are not simple like “twitter dot com slash brian enigma.” They look a little more like this:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/112685670115016110336
That’s all well and good for emailing the link or embedding it in a post, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue. I have a vanity domain that I do not really make much use of, so I thought I might make a shortcut there. So now, if you want to find me on Google Plus, just go to:
If you are running your own Apache web server and would like the .htaccess
rule for making such a link, it looks a little something like this:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^g\+$ https://plus.google.com/u/1/112685670115016110336 [L,R]
† I’m thinking mainly of features like broadcasting Hangouts, which Ada was doing by duct-taping a 3rd-party broadcast service on top of the group video chat Hangouts, which Google later integrated as a view-only mode to Hangouts. The rigid and public gender categorization hasn’t yet been addressed.