If you build it, they will come. Perhaps. And only if you don’t chase them away.
Recently Google co-founder Sergey Brin took to the stage at the TED “Ideas Worth Spreading” conference. His idea worth spreading? That cellphones are “emasculating.” → Read More
Growth, to reach more users, and data, to improve the experience. That’s what apps need in an identity and social system. They’re what Facebook and Twitter deliver, and what the new Google+ Sign-In can’t without completed profiles, the social graph, and eyeballs. Logging into apps with your Google credentials would be convenient, but developers may be reluctant to offer the option. → Read More
By Google’s count, Google+ has over 500 million “upgraded” members and some 135 million people active “in just the stream.” By researchers’ best estimates, however, the answer is a bit more complicated. → Read More
Google Plus experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments. Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits … → Read More
The Google+ iPhone and iPad apps are now available in 48 countries and territories, announced Google engineer Frank Petterson via his own Google+ profile (h/t TNW). → Read More
Whether you use Google+ knowingly or not, meaning whether or not you actually engage on the destination site, you have to realize that the project has been a complete shift for the entire company as a whole. Even though it has a separate name and a separate URL, you simply cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that the social tools within the project have been weaved into Google’s biggest products. → Read More
This week Twitter launched its new API. There are still lots of questions about what this means for developers, and what role developers have played in Twitter’s rise. But the general consensus seems to be that it doesn’t matter much for most users.
Apparently most users just use Twitter’s official clients and supposedly will never notice if Twitter bans most third party clients. Even if that’s… → Read More
Following moves that began last October, when Google began allowing Google Apps users access to Google+, the company announced today several more features which are aimed at pushing Google-branded social experiences deeper into the business world. Specifically, the company is rolling out support for restricted sharing options, video meetings integrated with other Google products like Gmail… → Read More
As the lines between Google and Google+ grow blurrier, so do privacy norms. Today we’re posed with whether we want our location made abundantly clear to anyone we share G+ posts with. Now when you post to G+ from mobile and you enable automatic location sharing or geo-tag yourself at a local spot, a big Google Map of your exact location is shown in the G+ stream on the web.
The combination of… → Read More
Google is in the process of acquiring the Frommer’s travel brand from the publishing company John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in what is a further effort to beef up its Google+ business information listings service. The deal is nearly closed, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, which also speculates that the Frommer’s brand could be merged into Google’s Zagat brand following the… → Read More
Since The Oatmeal draws comics like 5 Ways To Fight A Crack Whore, the kids down in Mountain View figured they could play a joke on him.
This summer the artist wrote that Google+ comment threads sound like *crickets*, poking fun at the social network’s lack of engagement. He also criticized not being able to “set up a fancy profile URL so I don’t have to link people… → Read More
You shouldn’t have to squint at Like and retweet counts to discover the best content your social network has to offer. So with one simple design choice, Google+ for iPad (and Nexus 7 ) has created a better tablet feed reading experience than Facebook or Twitter. As Google announced at I/O, on tablet, Google+ posts with more engagement are shown larger.
The Google+ iPad app launched today… → Read More
Less than a year after the debut of gaming on Google’s social platform, Google+, two game developers are pulling their titles. Bejeweled Blitz, a popular game owned by Electronic Arts‘ Pop Cap divsion, and several titles from Wooga, the maker of games for children, will no longer be available on the Google+ social network. → Read More
Desperate to increase video chat usage, Facebook is testing out a “Call” button on top of people’s timeline profiles. I don’t think I’ve received a Facebook video chat since Facebook partnered with Skype to launch the feature a year ago, but now that might change. If a friend is online on the desktop version of Facebook, those in the test see a “Call” button next to that friends name on their… → Read More
Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is… → Read More
This morning, Google officially rolled out Google+ Hangouts On Air to all users worldwide, following the feature’s limited introduction back in September. At the time of its initial release, this live broadcasting feature allowed top Google+ users (like celebs) to stream live video feeds directly to their Google+ fan base. The service kicked off with a Google+ Hangouts stream from will.i.am, but… → Read More
Blogs and content sites are only willing to give up valuable real estate and clutter themselves with social sharing buttons if they get ample referral traffic in return. That’s the big problem with the Google+ Share button that launched today with no launch partners or live examples of it in use. The embeddable button for posting webpages to the Google+ news feed with an optional comment is going… → Read More
A recent post by a defecting Googler (at his new and previous home, Microsoft) suggests that a fundamental reordering of Google’s priorities has made it far less than the company it once was. A sudden comprehension of the danger posed by Facebook’s ever-expanding platform caused the company to enter a sort of berserker state, focusing solely on reinventing social while neglecting or amputating… → Read More
Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, and places you’ve lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more… → Read More
If there’s one thing wrong with Google+ it’s a lack of a real non-browser interface. There are workarounds and widgets, but there’s never been a real way to pull your G+ feed into a more comfortable format. While many would complain that RSS isn’t even close to a comfortable format, it’s bettern’ nuffin’.
That said, a new free service called GPlusRSS allows you to create a public RSS feed of… → Read More
Google is opening up its social networking service Google+ to teens as of today, according to a post from Google’s VP, Product Management, Bradley Horowitz. The move puts the network in closer competition with Facebook, which also requires that individuals be at least 13 year old before creating an account.
Says Horowitz, everyone who’s old enough for a Google account (13+ in most countries)… → Read More
Facebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site: ZoomSphere. It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country. Oddly, the site doesn’t rank user profiles like SocialStatistics does — just brand pages. Still, by augmenting its existing charts for… → Read More
That’s a good thing because Google+ missed the starting gun. And its “invite only” launch strategy saw all its disconnect users flailing independently. But in the long run that might not matter much, because Google+ doesn’t need a critical mass or tons of engagement. It needs signups so it can get its identity layer under users of its other products. That way it can turn everyone’s searches… → Read More
Google+ has found its place in the social network ecosystem: Twitter is the interest network, Facebook is the social network, Path is the micronetwork, and now Google+ is the macronetwork. With the new Circles volume slider, you categorize people and then adjust the presence of those entire sets of people in your main stream. This lets you efficiently consume updates from across relationship… → Read More
It looks like Google+ is adding a feature that will allow users to “check-in” via the Google+ mobile application in order to receive a time-sensitive deal or discount. This feature is mentioned in Google Places’s help documentation, but has not yet been made available to business owners using the Google Places service. → Read More
People are all caught up in today’s Google Doodles but for all the wrong reasons. Yes, there’s a customizable turkey for the US and a fun sci-fi game for Europe. But did you notice the G+ button hovering below the turkey? Google is now using its most visible, accessible, viral element to get people to sign up and share on Google+. If worked into future Doodles, this could be quite fruitful. → Read More
Google is shipping more Google+ features today designed to increase user engagement and sharing. These include a YouTube slider that lets you watch and share YouTube videos with your Google+ friends and two new Google Chrome extensions for sharing webpages and tracking your Google+ notifications. → Read More
Today, Google is rolling out its update to Google Reader which features the promised user interface overhaul, and, more importantly, the new Google+ integration. Now, Google Reader users can “+1″ items directly from Google Reader to share it with their friends on Google+. This feature now replaces the “Share” and “Share with Note” options previously present. → Read More
Is this a contrarian view? I can’t even tell any more. On one hand, Google Plus now has 40 million users, it’s the fastest-growing social-networking site in history, and its users have uploaded 3.4 billion photos. On the other, Google is mum about how many of those users are actually active; some say that its traffic has declined significantly from its peak; Google’s own management didn’t much use… → Read More
Remember Google engineer Steve Yegge’s long rant about his past experiences at Amazon and his current employer’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+ (which he dubbed a “knee-jerk reaction” and a “pathetic afterthought”? If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth your time.
Yegge has now followed up on his it-was-meant-to-be-an-internal-memo diatribe, saying nothing bad happened to… → Read More
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