According to a post by Christian Oestlien, whose profile lists him as The Google+ Project Ads Guy (ironic), it never occurred to any of the brilliant minds in the Googleplex that brands, businesses, groups or other organizations that are larger than one person would want to participate.

“There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers…The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself,” says Oestlien.

Really? After the massive success of Facebook pages, it never once occurred to Google that if Google+ was going to offer itself up as an alternative to the dominant social network, a business option might be needed? And the solution is just “find a real person”? We can’t recall a single brand telling users to find them on Facebook and add their marketing manager as a friend.

Not to mention, when Google does open up to the public – which is expected to be much sooner than “a few months,” longterm usage and success will probably hinge on less tech savvy users being able to find and follow their favorite singer, or sports team, or news network, or favorite restaurant or any number of other accounts that really just don’t make sense on a personal profile – no matter how advanced or easy to use filters may be.

Recognizing that, Google reinstated Ford’s account, and made arrangements with Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to have him use the Mashable profile as a personal one. Apparently there’s no love for Big Bird and Elmo, because Sesame Street continues to return a 404. News Stream, a program on CNN International still has a profile, as does the Next Web so we assume they’re two of the arbitrary “tiny handful” of business profiles deemed suitable for testing. Meanwhile, the brands and businesses not deemed important enough to participate – Signature9 included – have been left wondering how something so obvious was overlooked in the first place.

Oh, and it’s pissing off the early adopters who’ve been helping Google+ achieve such rapid growth. Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media offers a summary of why playing favorites after creating a messy game isn’t the best move.

Can we at least convince a graphic design over at Google HQ to slap a beta label on this project?

It’s not uncommon to read about website acquisitions on TechCrunch, but on Tuesday, the popular tech blog was the subject of the story when they officially announced an acquisition by Aol. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but estimates put the purchase price somewhere between $25 million {Bloomberg} and $40 million {CNBC} for the TechCrunch network of blogs. Considering that TechCrunch never took on outside investment, founder Michael Arrington likely got the lion’s share of the money. In addition to the blogs that make up the network, there’s CrunchBase, a database of startups and investors, and events like TechCrunch Disrupt (formerly known as TechCrunch 40, then 50) and the Crunchie awards that likely made TechCrunch an attractive target.

Acquisitions of popular tech blogs aren’t anything new: Conde Nast purchased Ars Technica for $25 million in 2008; ContentNext Media, which includes digital media blog paidContent was acquired by the Guardian for $12.5 million; GigaOm is part of a tech blog network that’s raised $5.3 million from investors. TechCrunch was one of the last holdouts when it came to accepting outside investment, but now that they’re part of Aol (who are redefining themselves as a digital content company), which blogs and networks might be next on the acquisition list? Looking beyond tech, here are our best picks.

Mashable

A partnership with CNN means founder Pete Cashmore, and the stories on Mashable are already exposed to a fairly wide audience. CNN parent company Time Warner was eager to get out of its merger with AOL, so it’s unlikely that they’d be looking to add a purely digital publication to their stable. The mass market appeal could make Mashable an attractive acquisition target for Yahoo (who acquired Associated Content not long ago) or another company looking to add a popular blog brand their content portfolio. And, like TechCrunch, Mashable’s branched out from purely blog based revenue by organizing paid professional events.

Also like TechCrunch, Mashable hasn’t taken any money from investors, which means the decision to sell likely comes down to far fewer people.

Sugar Inc. Network

PopSugar, FabSugar, BellaSugar… if you’re interested in celebrities, fashion or beauty, chances are that you’ve read one of the Sugar Inc. blogs in the past month. The company’s success comes not only from the Sugar branded blogs, but acquired blogs like Coutorture and Fashionologie. Shopping search engine ShopStyle, one of the Sugar Network’s other acquisitions, is the one that would make a Sugar Inc acquisition so attractive to a large media company. Hearst acquired social shopping site Kaboodle, Time recently picked up StyleFeeder – a ShopStyle competitor, but previously used ShopStyle to power the on site shopping search for InStyle.

Sugar Inc. reportedly used some of their $31 million in funding to buy themselves out of a sales deal with NBC, so don’t look there for a possible purchaser. While ShopStyle powers the clothing search on Style.com (see our Style.com reader profile), Conde Nast still seems to be focused on establishing magazine sites like Vogue.com and GQ.com as their digital flagships, and the previous acquisitions by Time and Hearst make them unlikely suitors. Our guess for a potential acquirer? Wenner Media, the publisher behind UsWeekly, Rolling Stone and Men’s Health. The celebrity overlap with UsWeekly makes sense, and buying Sugar would be an easy way for the company to step up their digital offerings, which are currently pretty thin.

Gawker Media

Add Gawker to the list of major independent blog networks who haven’t taken outside investment. While they’re a pure media play – no events, no software based web services – Gawker does the pure media thing better than almost any other network out there. Gizmodo regularly gets tech scoops and exclusives that keep a substantial audience, and the other blog properties are no exception. Jezebel regularly exposes photoshop debacles, Gawker takes on hipster hiring policies and New York personalities, and after shuttering underperforming sites, the Gawker portfolio of sites lead in their respective categories.

While they haven’t been making many acquisitions lately – just trying to survive has been a full time job – we can see Gawker eventually ending up under the Gray Lady (the New York Times).

Those are our picks for the next big acquisition target – what are yours?

The first invitations to the site went out almost exactly one year ago, and in that time it’s gotten pretty popular – about 1.2 million people a month visit to answer personality questions. Hunch’s latest time killing, but fun, service is a Twitter followers analyzer that makes educated guesses about the people following you. The service only works with accounts that have more than 1000 followers right now, which means we couldn’t get anything back for our wonderful readers who follow @Signature9, but our hunch is that if you do you’re gorgeous, brilliant and charming. Gorgeous, brilliant and charming, but not following Signature9? You should click here, click follow and fix that!

Back to the original topic. There’s nothing earth shattering in the revelations – Gilt Groupe followers are likely to be female (we could have gotten that one), but some of them are fun. Here are a few of the odder hunches we found when running some of our favorite Tweetstars through.

The followers of fashion favorites @GiltGroupe @Sartorialist and @InsideDVF would rather ride a Vespa than a Harley.

@NetAPorter followers think alien abductions are real

@Fashionista_com and @GaranceDore followers have mailed a hand-written note, letter or card in the last 6 months

@Karl_Lagerfeld followers: prefer smaller portions of food that are arranged well, have dated or hooked up with someone they met online, choose the New York Times over the Wall Street Journal or USA Today as their free hotel paper of choice, can make reservations in 2 or 3 languages (only at restaurants that don’t overfeed you, of course), aren’t reading Vogue for the articles, think All-You-Can-Eat buffets are gross, are Mac people, and like celebrity gossip, reality TV and awards shows among other things.

Would you rather: George or Mario?

And who do these people consider most attractive out of a Nicole Kidman, Eva Longoria Parker, Mario Lopez, George Clooney lineup? The ladies who follow Lagerfeld love Clooney. @WomensWearDaily and @AmericanApparel followers agree, while @LouisVuitton_US followers prefer Mario Lopez.

Moving on to the foodies, @DavidLebovitz’s followers are also Clooney and Vespa people, frequent flossers, own a single piece of art valued at more than $2500, have something in their closet from Prada, Gucci, or Dolce & Gabbana and like opera.

@ClotildeNet (Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini) followers think crossword puzzles are more pleasure than pain, also like opera, and will take a meal prepared at home over one of those small, pretty restaurant dishes.

And what should we know about the people following the Tech Set? @TechCrunch followers will buy you birthday cake from an expensive bakery, gave flowers to someone not including mom, dad, grandma or grandpa in the last 6 months, can deal with roaches, spiders and snakes, but are creeped out by rats (we’re creeped out by all of them), are only reading Playboy for the articles, go for Eva Longoria Parker in the attractive multiple-choice category, and would share their $100+ bottle of wine with her.

@Mashable followers will also make sure you’re not stuck with a grocery store cake, also get the creeps from rats, support charities regularly, and they likely have a famous celebrity or politician on speed dial in their iPhone.