One thing Twitter and a lot of other social sites have that Google+ lacks is a nice, short url to give to people. I can say:
“Nice to meet you, I’m at twitter.com/iamjason.”
And there I am. That’s a lot easier than saying:
“Why hello there, would you like to follow me at https://plus.google.com/u/0/101453275162405736930/posts?”
After the 6th digit or so people wander off. Just imagine trying to spell it out during a candlelit dinner on your first date with someone. Ruins the mood.
I could use a redirect service, like gplus.to, for a vanity url, but then they get to see who’s going to my profile and it’s sort of up to them if it keeps working.
So now I just tell everyone to go to jasonmorrison.net/+. It’s easy to set up, if you have your own domain. Here’s how to do it if your web server is running Apache, which is pretty common:
Step 1: FTP to your server, go to the root directory for your site, and open or create an .htaccess file.
Step 2: Put this in your .htaccess file:
Redirect permanent /+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/(your profile id)/posts
This will create a 301 (permanent) redirect to your profile, which also tells search engines that you mean business.
Step 3: Order a new box of business cards, with your spiffy new Google+ profile link.
Hope this helps!
Even better: If you do a meta refresh redirect you can throw your google analytics tags on the page.
Keep in mind if your website ever goes down the url won’t work.
Wouldn’t it be safer to do:
Redirect permanent /+ https://plus.google.com/
/u/{integer}/ is applicable only if you are logged into multiple Google accounts. https://plus.google.com/ will anyway take you to the profile, so why bother about the extra url parameters.
Hey Lovell. I’m creating a link to my profile specifically, not the Google Plus homepage. The point is I can now tell anyone to follow me on Google+ by going to jasonmorrison.net/+