Google+ has had check-ins for months. They’re easier to access on the iPhone app than the Android app (interestingly enough), and Google has allowed you to check in using Latitude and Google Places for quite some time.

As you may know, Google also has Google Offers, its own deals product. It should be no surprise that Google continues to integrate its various products together. This will continue. It will certainly continue with Google Offers and Google+. It only makes sense that the two should be married.

Last week, Mike Blumenthal discovered a page discussing the check-in offers while perusing the Google Places Offer Help center. He quoted the following text from a page he found (which has since been removed):

If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers. They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer.

If your customers do not have to visit your location, for example if you serve homes or businesses by delivery or by callouts, you can keep this option off (set to “No”) and customers will not be asked to check-in when they redeem offers. We use the Service Areas and Location Settings setting on your listing to determine if you have a service area for offers that have already been created. When you create new offers, you can choose whether to allow a check-in during redemption.

This should provide businesses with yet another way to get more out of Google+. Google Offers itself still has quite a bit of expanding to to, in terms of spreading to more cities, but it has been expanding fairly steadily. This should continue for the foreseeable future.

Frederic Lardinois at Silicon Filter quotes Mayer as saying, “We think there are interesting ways we can monetize this, but also ways to help our users save money,” and says she indicated that Google is continuing work on other location products like Latitude.

Some have wondered if Latitude would disappear in favor of Google+. I’m still betting that it will go away eventually, at least as a standalone product, but it appears to be safe for now.

Mayer, VP of Maps and Location Services at Google, has become one of the most public faces of the company over the last several years. And now, according to the San Francisco Examiner, she is the target of a Twitter stalker.

According to court documents, 27-year-old Gregory Calvin King was arrested and has now been indicted on multiple counts of threats transmitted through interstate communication and harassing communications. The records indicate that King posted the threats on Twitter, addressed to one “M.M.”

King’s Twitter account, @gck764 is still active and shows over 20,000 tweets that mention @marissamayer. The tweets begin in November of 2010 and end on August 19th of 2011, the day that King was reportedly arrested.

The tweets are lewd, threatening, racist and most of the time make little to no sense. On multiple occasions King tweets at Mayer stuff about being “infected” – oftentimes blaming her for it.

(Warning: Most of the tweets are NSFW)

The tweets are also threatening, as he makes multiple references to shooting and killing. One tweet even reads “I should fucking shoot your ass marissa.”

Much of the tweeting directed toward Mayer is of a sexual nature. King makes hundreds of references to Mayer’s body, and about having sex with her –

And like I said before, many of the Tweets are either random in topic or they seem rather delusional.

There is no word on whether Mayer reported the Twitter harassment to the authorities herself. It’s highly unlikely that she wouldn’t have noticed the tweets. I counted on one day, August 18th, King sent over 130 tweets at Mayer.

According to the FBI, “there is no known connection between King and the Google Executive.”

King is being held without bail awaiting a future court date at a time to be determined. If convicted, he faces up to 7 years in prison.

[Lead Image Courtesy Google+]

In terms of that slow location-based service adoption, Mayer said, "I think a lot of this means that it’s just very early. So it’s a very fast moving space. It’s very interesting. It’s one of the reasons I was really excited to move over and work in this area. But it’s just very early, and so I think that we are still experimenting with what are the incentives? What are the rewards? What’s the user value proposition? Why should I want to use a location-based service, especially on my phone, because the phone has basically unlocked all of this potential."

"So part of it is, as there’s more and more smartphones, I think there will be more and more people using location," she added. "We’re already seeing this with Google Maps for Mobile. But I think that as this progresses and people get more deals, offers, better offers, better value, better recommendations on where to go, start meeting up with friends…more users will adopt it."

When you think of location-based services, you might think more about things like Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVGR, etc. but this space is closely tied with the deals space, because ultimately this is going to be one of the main ways to attract users – businesses harnessing services like these to get people in the door. 

When we think of deals these days, Groupon of course comes to mind. After news came out of Groupon denying Google’s bid, many of us wondered what Google’s next move would be. Would they try to acquire one of Groupon’s competitors? Would they simply build their own competitor? Mayer reminds us, however, that Google already has some things that could easily compete (and in some ways already do) in this space. It’s just a matter of the right integration and implementation of products. 

"I think that when you look at our overall suite of services, especially around our advertising, we already have some things that are like this," Mayer said. "We have things like coupons and offer extension ads that allow merchants to basically make offers to our users. So we’re looking at how we can take that technology and put it to use, especially in the location space."

Mayer running the show in that area can’t be a bad thing. She’s got a pretty good track record in her old stomping ground (search). While she didn’t exactly rule out the possibility of other acquisitions in this area (in fact Google is likely to continue the acquisition spree of 2010 into the New Year), it’s clear that Google does in fact have a number of the pieces of the puzzle in its possession already. It’s just a matter of fitting them together in the right ways (much like in the social space). 

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason recently called Groupon the savior for small businesses. Some businesses might have given this title to Google back when AdWords came out. While Google is not without its critics, there is no question that the company has already begun placing a great deal more emphasis on local, and is already the go-to place for finding local business info for a lot of users. It stands to reason that Google will be among the big players in both location-based services and deals. At the very least, it’s going to be hard to keep Google very far away from the conversation. 

Then there’s that whole social layer thing.

Reports indicate Mayer will now supervise Google’s products and services related to local markets and geolocation.  What’s more, she’s supposed to join Google’s operating committee, which is an elite group of decision makers within the company.

That second detail makes this move look like a big win for Mayer, who was one of Google’s first 20 employees.  The first fact, meanwhile, has some people speculating that the whole thing constitutes a demotion.

This change does mean someone else will begin to oversee Google’s search efforts, after all, and search remains the company’s hallmark.  So it could be that Google’s trying to shake things up in the face of the Bing-Yahoo partnership.

Anyway, Udi Manber, who started at Google in 2006 after working at both Yahoo and Amazon, is the individual who will now direct the company’s search operations, according to Brian Womack.

It should be interesting to see if any new products or services are rolled out in an effort to stir up enthusiasm for these changes.

That’s one hard-to-avoid conclusion, anyway.  Another is that Google’s actually decided to drive searchers to use Bing (compare the "synthetic lollipops that hurt your eyes" image to the gorgeous picture of Belem Tower and see if you don’t feel the same way).

Google’s official explanation is that it’s trying to promote a certain feature, though.  Marissa Mayer stated on the Official Google Blog, "Last week, we announced a new feature that lets you add a favorite photo or image to the background of your Google.com homepage.  To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we’ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage."

Then Mayer got to the point, adding, "We’ll be featuring these images as backgrounds on the Google homepage over the next 24 hours."

So this rather unfortunate experiment should be over soon.  Not soon enough for many people, granted, but perhaps far too soon for the liking of executives at Microsoft.

UPDATE: Things have returned to normal ahead of schedule.