+1 is a social recommendation and bookmarking service integrated into 3rd party websites and Google's search. It is orthogonal to Google+ (although both Google+ and +1 use the same social graph).
I guess I'm suffering from internet burnout, but I wasn't paying attention to the differentiation between Google+ and Google's +1. If they're not related then that's a really poor naming strategy.
A couple of levels up I mistakenly thought that the +1 buttons next to my search results were an early buzz effort for Google+. I thought "recommend this page" implied "recommend this page to my friends on Google+". I made that mistake because of the name similarity and the timing of release. If a marketer introduces an ambiguity, I don't think it's the responsibility of the target to disambiguate the message.
Whether on purpose or not, it's all very confusing: Google+, +1, Buzz, I still don't know which of those is supposed to do what and which of them is here to stay for the long term.
I was desperately looking for a way to add posts to my Google+ stream (like a tumble blog) from Firefox and I kept getting ways to +1 stuff, which does end up in Google +1, but hidden away and, grotesquely, with no way to even promote it to a full post.
And then there's these odd news feed like topics you can subscribe to in Plus -- which I guess might work if you're interested in sports or whatever, but I just keep wishing I could use it as a link to the similar-but-different Reader. Incidentally, what happens if you star something in Reader, does it +1 it, Buzz it, or is that another way of socially promoting it?
Don't forget Orkut(google owned) and Google Social Network (not 100% sure of the name) which is tightly integrated with blogger.
On a side, yet related, note: did anyone had a google email account in the late 90s? Long before gmail, google had an email service, it was by far the worst email service I've used, full of bugs, many long downtimes and countless other issues.
What huge marketing push? All Google did was post a blog about it and send out some invites.