The snark surrounding the relative unpopularity of Google+ makes it easy to dismiss the service as an also-ran – another failed attempt by Google to catch the social wave it tried to ride too late.

But the company's rollout of a slew of new Google+ features yesterday shows it has hardly given up. Instead, Google seems to think it can leverage its engineering and design brilliance to suck you into Google+ even if you don't really bother to use it as a social network at all. The approach seems to be that if Google can load Google+ with enough great features – live broadcasting, photo, and video this time around – the company can get you to turn over at least a part of yourself to its data-hungry hive mind. And once you're there, Google will figure out some way to monetize you.

One of the new features announced was that live-streaming service Google Hangouts will operate more like broadcast television. Users will be able to schedule live streams in advance and promote them through a page dedicated to the stream.

At the moment, none of the live streaming services — not Google Hangouts on Air, not Ustream, and not the more restrictive YouTube Live — are having more than a marginal impact on broadcast news, concerts, or the live events business generally. But 15 years of digital media history show that marginal online phenomena can quickly turn into big business, whether it’s MP3s on the open internet, custom online radio stations, paid movie streams on Netflix, or recorded amateur video on YouTube.

Google's latest move takes what has been a popular video-chat system for small groups and turns it into a much better vehicle for building an audience. The broadcast version of Google Hangouts, known as Google Hangouts on Air, launched two years ago, and has been widely available since May 2012. But until now the system wasn’t designed to handle scheduled shows of the sort that encourage repeat viewers.

The new and improved version of Hangouts on Air takes Google deeper into the field of live online video streaming, which has been dominated by dedicated players like Ustream, and which has become increasingly competitive with broadcast news and as an alternative to visiting live events like concerts.

The changes to the photo and video features of Google+, meanwhile, are all about enticements. Make your photos look better. Share them more easily. Find the good stuff more easily. All of these additions are meant to attract more users and more active use of Google+.

If Google+ offers the best photo experience, maybe you'll dump more of your pictures there instead of Facebook. And the more of your life you turn over to Google, the more valuable you become to Google's customers – that is, advertisers. As Google's understanding of you, your habits, preferences, social life, and consumption patterns becomes ever-more fine-grained, the ads Google shows you can become ever-more fine-tuned.

One impressive new feature Google announced yesterday is the ability to use text searches to find images in your photos. Search for "waterfall" or "sunset," Google senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said, and Google's pattern recognition engine is smart enough to find your pictures of waterfalls and sunsets.

It's an amazing feat of computing, but it also reveals how much Google can potentially know about its users based on the photos they upload. Most Gmail users, if they think about it at all, have resigned themselves to Google scanning the contents of otherwise private emails to serve up targeted ads. Though there's no indication Google is doing the same with photos, its ability to know what's in those photos shows the company could probably just as easily try to sell you dog treats if you have lots of pictures of dogs or, who knows, show you a coupon based on the brand of beer you're holding in a picture.

Such algorithmic sophistication is what makes Google Google. But its aggressive foray into photos also calls to mind another social network that has figured out a much simpler way to extract value from images.

Last week, Pinterest confirmed a $225 million funding round that valued the company at nearly $4 billion. The big numbers led to talk of froth and bubbles because Pinterest isn't trying too hard to make money yet. But Pinterest does have one thing of great value that Google wants. At Google, the world's smartest engineers try to figure out how to divine from your online behavior what it is you want to buy. On Pinterest, figuring that out is a lot easier: People just post nice pictures of the things they want.