Google+, which is only a little more than three months old, already has , compared with Facebook's more than 800 million. Now that Google+ is open to everyone, Google hopes the non-nerd crowd will sign up in big numbers.

It appears that Google hopes that users will open a Google+ account and later adopt it as their go-to social network because of its convenient integration with other Google services such as Google Docs and Google search. Time will tell.

There is a lot at stake here. The online advertising community is increasingly convinced that the web is becoming an inherently social place, and that ad dollars will flow to the platform that hosts the most users for the longest periods of time. Google made its fortunes on search advertising, but the paradigm appears to be shifting to social advertising, and right now, Facebook has a clear inside track.