Welcome to the world's newest social network! Google+ is here to be an "identity service" (at least from Google's perspective) and, of course, to compete and maybe defeat those upstarts over at Facebook and Twitter.
And with a new platform comes new rules, or, as we prefer to think of them, "rules to be broken." Because, while Google+ is a lot like its predecessors, it also introduces some very different ways of doing things. We're not here to tell you how to get the most out of those differences, but how to push them beyond the limit of good digital etiquette. Welcome to the next installment of our How to Be a Jerk series.
1) Add Everyone. I mean EVERYONE.
If you've got a YahooMail, Gmail, or Hotmail account, or any third-party address book, then you can throw them in a Google+ circle. Click the Circles button, then Find People, and put in everyone you know, as well as acquaintances you don't. They'll all get spammed by alerts notifying them that they're being followed on yet another social network they probably don't want to use.
2) Use a Pseudonym
The key to being an "identity service," at least from Google's and its marketing cronies' perspective, is to get you to use your real name. That way they can match your name everywhere and see what you're doing. I suppose it also makes it easier for your so-called "friends" to find you, especially if they already put you in a Circle. But if you can go the extra mile and create an entire account with a fake name, then no one will find you! You've made social networking entirely superfluous, congrats!
3) Don't Brand Yourself or Your Business
That Google+ profile that you should probably fill out in excruciating detail? You can skip it. When people find you or your business name in a search engine results page (SERP), it'll be missing important details and data, but if they really cared, they'd find you in the phone book, amIrite?
4) Translate THIS
Install the Google Translate for Google+ extension on your Google Chrome browser, and when you make a post, translate it into something like Chinese or Swahili or Yiddish before posting. Once you see it in the other language, cut and paste it to make sure others see it. (Yes, people with the extension can translate it back, but that's not as much fun.)
5) Ignore or Block the Circle Traffic
You can just pretend you care about people on Google+, just like on Facebook, by using the brand-new Ignore option. They won't show up in your stream, you won't get notifications about their inane activity, and they won't even show up on your circles page. It's not a full block, so they'll never know. A Block is the nuclear option; we recommend it highly, especially because they never get notified you did so.
6) Share, Share, Share
The +1 button is Google's answer to the "Like" button, which Facebook has made ubiquitous across the Web. At first, it was just to recommend pages so they'd get better placement on Google's SERP. But now that button lets you share directly to Google+ as well, with your Circles. There're also snippets available on some sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, so you can +1 something and never say why. Leave it up a while, then click that button again to "un-+1" it, and people might see some movies you actually hate on your temporary recommendation. But why wait for a site to support a +1 button? Get the Google +1 Button extension for Chrome and use it EVERYWHERE.
7) Personalize and Promote
Did you know you can take your own on-the-fly Google+ profile photo anytime you want with your own webcam? You sure can, and I suggest changing it often. Make sure to send your biggest Circle of friends a personal message whenever you do. They love narcissism.
8) Overdo the Overdue Formatting
In Twitter and Facebook, you don't get rich text for making a status update post. But you do in Google+. Or, at least, you can do bold (surround words with asterisks *like this*), italics (use underscores _like this_) or a strikethrough (using dashes, -like this-). Combine all three, like this: *-_this would be boldly italicized striked text!*-_ You should go nuts with this, it makes what you say so much more readable. And by readable, I mean the opposite of that.
9) Drag in your Facebook Friends
You know you can add almost anyone from your email address books, but what about all those Facebook friends you left behind? Use the Facebook Friend Explorer, a Google Chrome add-on that lets you "export friends" from Facebook and invite them to the new, socially-awkward-because-there's-no-one-here-yet party on Google+.
10) Make Multiple Tag Mentions
Ready to name drop all the cool people you know on Google+? Do it often and proudly by adding an @ or + symbol to your post and immediately typing their name without a space. You can then pick the name from a drop down. If you're not already in someone's circle, or they're not in yours, find their profile, pull the very long number from the end the end of the URL for that page, and drop that in with a + in front. Now you're tagging people who may not even know you, how cool is that?
11) Hangout Then Disappear
Start a Hangout to indicate you're ready for a face-to-face video chat with friends who may happen to be online at the same time. You can even invite people in your Circles. Then leave your computer…for hours.
12) Edit Yourself
I'm not saying be careful what you say, no. I'm saying, because Google+ lets you re-edit your posts (unlike Facebook, where you can only delete them), you can cause quite a stir. For example, post something like "I like kittens!" and hopefully get a ton of comments about how nice and thoughtful you are. Once you've got a full comment thread, change it to something else like "Nazi's aren't all bad!" and laugh at how stupid and evil those comments now appear.
For more tips on how to be a complete and utter jerk for the digital age, check out:
How to Be a Jerk on Facebook
How to Be a Jerk on Twitter
How to Be a Jerk in E-mail
How to Be a Mobile Jerk