It's essentially the "souped up" version of the old Google account that you had in the past. If you want, you can fill out a profile and use it to share/collab

It's essentially the "souped up" version of the old Google account that you had in the past. If you want, you can fill out a profile and use it to share/collaborate with other people or you can continue to ignore it if you aren't interested in those functions. I always thought it was kind of a bummer that G+ was dead in the water due to a critical mass of users on Facebook (and no common protocol like email, etc). If I had to choose one of those services for social networking I'd pick G+ any day due to (IMO) a much nicer UI, functionality, and mobile app but again, since you can't just pick your service and communicate with everyone, as you can with email, this would require everyone to migrate en masse and that just isn't happening for various reasons. So yeah, sorry for the digression. G+ is their name for the functions they added to the original Google account and can be used or ignored as you see fit.