Unless you've been living under a rock, you know by now that Google is launching yet another social network, called Google+. It's in a private, invitation-based beta test mode, and I managed to get one from Steph Romanski before the invitations were halted due to "overwhelming" demand. Here's a peek inside and a taste of what's coming from Google.

Is Google crazy? No. Facebook looks like an impregnable fortress, but so did Myspace not too long ago. Brands are volatile these days. And Google has some big artillery to fire. Millions of registered users of Gmail, Picasa, and Google Docs. It owns Android, the #1 mobile platform. And Chrome, the browser that's the new hotness. Google has done a terrible job of tying these assets together -- until now.

As part of the G+ beta launch, Google rolled out subtle design changes across its landscape. Take a look at my logged-in Chrome browser. Above my custom background (Chistye Prudy, Moscow) is a clean new warm-gray nav bar. Note the "+Steve" link on the left (G+) and the red notification signal on the right.

This puts G+ front and center for Google users who log in. The nav bar carries over across all the core Google products. Although the links shift around depending on context, G+ is never more than a click away. The navbar is executed with a sense of typography and visual style that's head and shoulders above the clunky Google of the past. This is part of a general attention to fit and finish that extends across G+, and hopefully the rest of Google over time.

When you click on G+, you go straight to your "Stream" page, whose layout and purpose is generally similar to Facebook's News Feed. The items currently are sorted primarily by recent comments, an algorithm Google is tuning after testers complained. 

On the left rail there are links to "Circles" which are basically lists of your peeps. This is Google's major advance in social networking, an attempt to better reflect real-world social connections. You can create circles and sort people into any that make sense (even more than one group).  

Organizing people in groups is a simple drag-and-drop operation. 

Circles act as filters for viewing the stream, but also for posting. You can restrict a post to any combination of groups, or down to a single user (the equivalent of private messaging), or even a mix of users and groups. This is privacy control done right.

Existing Google services such as Google Talk (chat), Buzz (Twitter-like stream), and Profiles are being integrated into G+. Probably the best is Picasaweb, the photo-sharing companion to the Picasa photo application. If you install the very good Android app, all your mobile photos can be automatically pushed to a private Picasaweb folder for easy, highly controllable sharing inside and outside of G+. 

One of the new twists in G+ is "Sparks," a subscribable feed of topics-based news items that serve as conversation starters, with clear "share" links. This is one component that news organizations need to monitor: How well are you performing there? The links appear to come from the Google News engine, but I have not seen confirmation of that.

Now for what I think is potentially the killer app: Hangouts. Pretty much every laptop comes with a webcam these days. You can share your video stream with individuals or circles, allowing others to join in group video chats. Supposedly you can even do a group video chat watching YouTube. Mystery Science Theater 3000, here we come. 

"Check your hair" works better if you have some, I suppose.

All of this adds up to a "better Facebook," but not a "better Twitter." As a fast and furious chatty newsfeed, it fails. Twitter's enforced brevity, linear nature, and third-party app support is better for that.

Speaking of third-party apps -- there aren't any. This isn't public yet and there is not yet an API for developers to use. This means G+ is mercifully free of annoying Farmville and the legions of credential-stealing scam applications that infest Facebook. We'll see how that changes when Google unveils the API it's working on. Google has done a poor job of policing the Android market, so it's something to worry about.

Does all of this add up to a win for Google? It's hard to say. Facebook has a huge user base, and any other potential competitor would be hard-pressed to persuade people to switch. But this is Google -- and Gmail -- and YouTube -- and Blogger-- and Google Voice. Proper, usable integration of great stand-alone experiences has been Google's biggest failure to date. G+ signals a major and welcome change in that area. This is definitely Google with a plus.

Forgive me, nightside copy editors, for I have come to dash your hopes and crush your spirit.

I come as one of you, having edited many thousands of stories and written many thousands of headlines in the darkness of an approaching newspaper deadline. But those days are gone, and that era is past. It's time to let go.

Forget about the horseshoe-shaped universal desk, the rim rat and the slot chief. They are as outdated as green eyeshades, pica poles, rubber cement, and drawing little lines below "w" and above "m" so as not to confuse the Ludlow machine operator.

The flat truth is: If you're editing stories for a newspaper deadline, you're doing it wrong.

And you can take down that arrogant sign over the desk that says "Where the work gets done." (This was a real sign at one newspaper where I worked.)

I do not suggest that copy should not be edited. "Everybody needs an editor" is as true today as it was when I had long hair and a motorcycle.

But editing should be tightly coupled with newsgathering and writing. If your newsgathering process isn't producing clean, publishable copy, you're not ready for a digital world. Fix it.

Print is, at best, a static fork of a continuous digital process. If you're waiting to post news until it's edited for print, you're killing your job. If you're posting news on the Web that isn't of publication quality, you're killing your job.

Many companies are centralizing or consolidating their print production operations. This is seen as a cost-cutting measure, and it is. We are seeing the sunset of print, and no amount of wishing and hoping will make it otherwise. Cutting the cost of print production as print revenues fade is the only responsible path, the only way to "save newspaper journalism" for a digital future.

I believe print layout/design is journalism. I understand the importance of qualified editors in the print-finishing process, writing or rewriting headlines, trimming and condensing stories to fit the unyielding requirements of the physical page.

But if that's where your editing is happening, you're screwed.

It's time to toss a flower, sprinkle some dirt, and say a prayer of thanks for the many years that the old-world copy desk reigned as the final arbiter of the daily truth. Let the undertaker have it, and move on.

And as your newsroom, information center, or whatever you call it shakes itself free of print, perhaps it can gain a new clarity of purpose. 

I've been doing a lot more Web browsing lately on my Android phone -- not because I'm too lazy to get out of bed, but because it's always on and always with me. And I've become increasingly annoyed at a practice that should have died years ago: links that can't be shared.

The first wave of unshareable links came at the dawn of the broadband era from simple Web apps like real estate listing services. Find a house? Want to show it to the spouse? No sharing for you! Unthinking programmers would stuff the important bits into a secret session variable or cookie, and the visible link wouldn't send you to the resource. This stupidity has been mostly stamped out.

But we're doing it again -- to mobile users. Today's unshareable links generally come from subpar mobile service vendors who don't bother to "twin" the URLs of the full-scale Web resources they duplicate.

Often when you visit a full-scale news site with a mobile Web browser, you get bounced to a special mobile site. This can be done in a way that delivers the right content to the user, but sloppy and unthinking developers don't bother. No sharing for you! Instead, you get a 404 page.

This is simple: Do it right, or don't bother having a mobile site.

Shared links have always been important, but in the last few years they've risen to surpass inbound search as traffic drivers for many sites. If you've ever watched a teen use the Internet, you should know where this is going: mobile Facebook. A link that doesn't work for a mobile users is worse than useless. You're burning a customer. Don't do it.

I found myself annoyed the other day by the Washington Post's unusually small, hard to read body type, so I installed the very nice CSSViewer Chrome extension and took a look at several sites to see what's popular these days.

When activated, CSSViewer pops up a display of the active CSS rules for whatever element you're pointing at. Here's what I found.

On my blog, I'm currently using 15px Baskerville with a 22px line height.

I don't have good data over time, but I think there's a general trend toward larger body type on story pages. Some of our very old site designs are using 12px Arial with no extra line height, which is terrible for readability.

Designers coming from the print world may trip over the fact that points and pixels are not the same thing.

Points are a printing measure roughly equivalent to 1/72nd of an inch. Pixels are relative to screen resolution. Mixing them in a document can lead to unexpected results depending on the computer you're using, but in general, 12px is roughly equivalent to 9 point type. That's a common size for newspaper body type, but not very Web-friendly.

A bit of history:

Before computers took over print composition, type was made of physical objects and sizes had names like agate, minion and brevier. Agate came to mean any local standard for sports results and stock listings. Minion came to mean body type, regardless of whether it was 8pt (brevier) or 7pt (real minion) or even 9pt (bourgeois). The actual size of the type might even be in half-point increments. Metal type was placed in a frame called a "chase" and shims ("ledding") were manually inserted to make it square up properly.

Around 1970, the Minneapolis Tribune underwent a major redesign that was intended to pave the way for computer layout. Even though there weren't any computers back then capable of such a task, the design visually simplified the pages. (The design rule is "reduce the number of vertical and horizontal axes.")

To make the math easier, the design was built around a grid system of 9.5pt units. The headline schedule was exact multiples of grids.

When I worked at the newspaper in the 1980s, it was electronically paginated on a wireframe system, and depths -- including photo sizes -- were all measured in grid units. Somewhere I probably still have a grid stick.

Computers got smarter, and the idea of simplifying the grid to make it easier to calculate seems silly today. Unfortunately, that's led to an abandonment of the mathematical principles behind classical headline schedules and body type sizing. Copy too long? Cheat by shrinking it a little. Headline short? Warp it into place. We can do this on the Web and in print with equal flexibility.

The cost of this is an open door to the visual clutter of arbitrary sizes and shapes, and at the Web implementation level, CSS files that are long nightmares of special-case tweaks instead of short expressions of sound planning.

Fortunately, there's a counter-movement in the 960 grid system and its multiple implementations. I endorse its goals, as I also endorse body type big enough to read.