“Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a statement. “Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers.”

The acquisition has the approval of both companies’ boards and is expected to close by the end of this year or early 2012. It dwarfs Google’s previous biggest deal, the 2008 purchase of DoubleClick for $3.2 billion.

In premarket trading, shares of Motorola Mobility soared 60 percent, or $14.72, to $39.19. Shares of Google, meanwhile, fell $14.68, or 2.6 percent, to $549.95.

When I ask the 17-year-old version of that boy what Google+ is for, he says — texts, actually — “its pretty sick, there’re a lot of cool features thatll be awesome once more people get on. like better chatting and you can really control who sees what.”

Alrighty then. Feeling positively hip, I head over, activate my invitation, upload a good-hair-day picture and type in a few simple words for my profile that seem to fit well with the spare, airy Google interface: “Writer, editor, public school advocate, parent, lover, friend, walker of dog.” So far, so good.

I click “Circles” and a lovely row of them appears for me to populate — Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Following and one helpfully left blank for me to label (Frenemies? Mean Girls? Former Crushes?) — along with a phrase in red awaiting my click: “Find and Invite (560).”

Whoa, Google+ wants to find and invite 560 of my contacts? Hold up. Even though my son would tell me, with eyes rolling, that only losers click on “find all” menu options like that, it’s a potent reminder that I’m starting down the slippery slope of adding yet another social medium into my already overwhelmed digital life.

I say that as a woman teetering on the brink of an electronic messaging meltdown. I have 150 unprocessed messages on Facebook, 258 texts on my cellphone and — I am not proud of this — 47,185 emails in my Gmail inbox.

Because I have failed to organize my 221 Facebook friends or the 551 people I follow on Twitter into any kind of order, a wave of random digital news washes over me hourly, with updates from my former high school band director, my boss’s boss’s boss, an eco-activist organization to which I once gave $10, Anthony Bourdain, my youngest brother’s former girlfriend and my dog all arriving in an unending, unedited stream. (Yes, the dog has her own Facebook page, don’t ask.) Last week a new contact on LinkedIn emailed me to helpfully point out that my Career Summary there is more than a year out of date. I’ll get right on that.

Now Google+ wants me to interact in a new, groovy way with 560 people? No no no.

My instinct is to back slowly away from the electronic messaging bar. Last call for the digitally disorganized. And yet, I can’t quite force myself to leave the room entirely. After all, Google+ is the greatest thing to hit social networking since, uh, the last great thing to hit social networking. I don’t want to be left behind if all the cool kids jump ship, do I?

Truth be told, I feel a little resentful toward Google+, even as I admire its pretty circles. It took me a long time to “get” Facebook, just as it took me a long time to get Twitter, and LinkedIn, and before that to get the hang of blogs — of just being online, in all its nuanced permutations. I work hard at being what used to be called a “good Netizen” — reading the links that people share, commenting thoughtfully on blog posts, pausing to consider honestly before I “like” something. It’s exhausting trying to keep up.

Now Google+ comes along, threatening to topple Facebook and dismantle my little world in the process. At some point in the future, a tech innovation is going to come along that I just can’t grasp. And there I’ll be, alone and pathetic, like the last MySpace user on the site.

With that specter hanging over my head, I can’t bring myself to delete my Google+ account, but neither do I have the emotional energy to start populating my circles. Instead, I hang out there by myself and putter, add a few pictures, type in a status update or two that nobody can see. It’s like having a blog that nobody reads, or scoring a backstage pass to Lollapalooza and then spending all your time hiding behind a wall of speakers. Actually, it’s oddly pleasing to hide out online, like being in a tiny, private eye of the very large storm that is the Internet. I feel happy in my cocoon — I’m there but not yet there.

Of course, it doesn’t last long. Because I’m using Google+’s default settings, people can still see my name, even if they can’t creep on my profile or read any status updates. So it’s only a matter of hours before I start seeing a trickle, and then a deluge, of notifications in my Gmail box that one person or another has added me on Google+. Sigh. Here we go again.

 Still, there was a brief moment there when my digital persona was truly hip for once in my online life: “I’m so cool, I have a Google+ account that’s entirely private.” I even considered messaging that to my son — via Facebook, our preferred method of communication — but why bother? He’d moved on already.

2. Japanese roller coaster of death

“The Takabisha” is a new ride at Fuji-Q Highland amusement park that boasts the world’s steepest drop (43 meters) and a 121-degree freefall at 100 mph. Or you could just jump out of a plane without a parachute and see what happens. Even watching the video is making me nervous.

3. Discerning Michael Bublé lyrics:

Bad Lip Reading turns “Just Haven’t Met You Yet“  into a Lonely Islands-y number called “Russian Unicorn.”

4. If you’re still having trouble figuring out Google+

Rocketboom has made a handy little explanation video. Not that I needed it. I totally understand Google+. Just not… the “Circles” part.

5. “This is a stickup!”

A supercut of cinema’s greatest bank robbery scenes, mashed together to look like one giant heist.

This “controlled demand” thing serves two purposes: It shows users that Google is taking care not to have a repeat of its Buzz fiasco from last year (which led to privacy lawsuits and no one using the program), as well as drumming up even more interest in its latest bid to enter the social networking industry. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “We only want to be in the ‘circles‘ that won’t have us.”

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

So which was Facebook: a new space for authentic communication between real people — or a new arena for self-promotion?

I could probably have handled this existential dilemma. And I know it’s one that a lot of people simply don’t care about. It bugged me, but it was the other Facebook problem that made me not want to use the service at all.

Facebook flattens our social relationships into one undifferentiated blob. It’s almost impossible to organize friends into discrete groups like “family” and “work” and “school friends” and so forth. Facebook’s just not built that way. (This critique is hardly original to me. But it’s worth repeating.)

In theory Facebook advocates a strict “one person, one account” policy, because each account’s supposed to correlate to a “real” individual. But then sometimes Facebook recommends that we keep a personal profile for our private life and a “page” for our professional life. Which seems an awful lot like “one person, two accounts.”

In truth, Facebook started out with an oversimplified conception of social life, modeled on the artificial hothouse community of a college campus, and it has never succeeded in providing a usable or convenient method for dividing or organizing your life into its different contexts. This is a massive, ongoing failure. And it is precisely where Facebook’s competitors at Google have built the strength of their new service for networking and sharing, Google+.

Google+ opened a limited trial on Tuesday, and last night it hit some sort of critical mass in the land of tech-and-media early adopters. Invitations were flying, in an eerie and amusing echo of what happened in 2004, when Google opened its very first social network, Orkut, to the public, and the Silicon Valley elite flocked to it with glee.

Google+ represents Google’s fourth big bite at building a social network. Orkut never took off because Google stopped building it out; once you found your friends there was nothing to do there. Wave was a fascinating experiment in advanced technology that was incomprehensible to the average user, and Google abandoned it. Buzz was (and is) a Twitter-like effort that botched its launch by invading your Gmail in box and raiding your contact list.

So far Google+ seems to be getting things right: It’s easy to figure out, it explains itself elegantly as you delve into its features, it’s fast (for now, at least, under a trial-size population) and it’s even a bit fun.

By far the most interesting and valuable feature of Google+ is the idea of “circles” that it’s built upon. You choose friends and organize them into different “circles,” or groups, based on any criteria you like — the obvious ones being “family,” “friends,” “work” and so on.

The most important thing to know is that you use these circles to decide who you’ll share what with. So, if you don’t want your friends to be bugged by some tidbit from your workplace, you just share with your workplace circle. Google has conceived and executed this feature beautifully; it takes little time to be up and running.

The other key choice is that you see the composition of your circles but your friends don’t: It’s as if you’re organizing them on your desktop. Your contacts never see how you’re labeling them, but your labeling choices govern what they see of what you share.

I’m sure problems will surface with this model but so far it seems sound and useful, and it’s a cinch to get started with it. Of course, if you’re already living inside Facebook, Google has a tough sell to make. You’ve invested in one network, you’re connected there; why should you bother? But if, like me, you resisted Facebook, Google+ offers a useful alternative that’s worth exploring.

The ideal future of social networking is one that isn’t controlled by any single company. But social networks depend on scale, and right now it’s big companies that are providing that.

Lord knows Google’s record isn’t perfect. But in this realm I view it as the least of evils. Look at the competition: Facebook is being built by young engineers who don’t have lives, and I don’t trust it to understand the complexity of our lives. It’s also about to go public and faces enormous pressure to cash in on the vast network it’s built. Twitter is a great service for real-time public conversation but it’s no better at nuanced social interaction than Facebook. Apple is forging the One Ring to rule all media and technology, and it’s a beaut, but I’ll keep my personal relationships out of its hands as long as I can. Microsoft? Don’t even bother.

Of the technology giants, Google — despite its missteps — has the best record of helping build and expand the Web in useful ways. It’s full of brilliant engineers who have had a very hard time figuring out how to transfer their expertise from the realm of code to the world of human interaction. But it’s learning.

So I’ll embrace the open-source, distributed, nobody-owns-it social network when it arrives, as it inevitably will, whether we get it from the likes of Diaspora and Status.net or somebody else. In the meantime, Google+ is looking pretty good. (Except for that awful punctuation-mark-laden name.)