You're right that Google Plus, its new social network, has been getting a lot of buzz online. I've been hooked into it for a few weeks now and I really like it, the conversations are smart, the people who are on the network seem to be more interested in business than mindless chitchat and silly games (like Facebook) and the design is typically stark, clean Google in appearance.

However, it's also not quite open to the public yet, sorry to report, so if you already have a Google account (for Gmail, for example) and go to the Google Plus home page -- plus.google.com -- you'll probably find that it says "coming soon" or "still in beta" for now.

Let's say that you don't have a Google account at all, however. If you go to that page, here's what you're going to see today:

Not unreasonably, click on the "Sign In" button, even though you don't have an account. You'll see, it'll work...

There's the link you want, on the bottom: "Create an account now". Click on that and it'll ask you for an email address, etc:

Don't have an email address at all? Then you'll need a friend to forward the verification email address to you, but do note that this is different from signing up for a Gmail address! I'll assume you do have an email address, even if it's @yahoo.com or even @hotmail.com. Enter it and pick a reasonably complex and hard-to-guess password and continue...

What's that? You hate these stupid "enter the letters above" CAPTCHA things? Yeah, you and everyone else. But it does generally let the site differentiate between a real person and a software program trying to sign up for hundreds or even thousands of accounts for purposes of spam or hacking. Worst case, click on the tiny wheelchair icon and there's a slightly different version of the CAPTCHA available.

In terms of your birthday? It's not a big deal if you don't enter your correct birthday, but you will want to remember what you did enter because if you lose access to the account, one of the ways you can verify it's yours is by correctly entering the date. I generally use my correct birthday but the wrong year, if you're curious. Identity theft and all that...

Enter all the data on this page, enter a good password, twice, and click "Submit" and you'll be ready to look in your email inbox to get the verification message, as Google explains:

In your inbox there should momentarily appear a message similar to this:

The long, complicated URL is the key. Click on it and you'll have just proven to Google that you do live at that particular email address and your account will be marked as verified.

Now's your chance to upload a photo, add some profile information, etc., all based on whether you're comfortable sharing that information or not:

Finally, with all that accomplished and you signed in to your new Google account, can you actually join Google Plus? A quick hop over to plus.google.com reveals that, as of this moment, well, it ain't good news:

I think that'll change pretty soon, but in the meantime if you're really eager to join Google Plus, please leave a request here as a comment -- including your Google account email address -- and I'll see if I can send you an invite from within the G+ system.