A few days ago, Aditya covered 5 advantages Google+ has over Facebook. Last week during the unfortunate serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Pratik Parekh pointed out to another advantage Google+ has over Facebook. This advantage is in link-sharing feature present on both sites.
If you followed social-media after Mumbai Blast closely, then you might have come across Wikipedia article links to Ajmal Kasab’s page being shared all over. Some miscreant had modified Kasab’s date of birth on his wiki page making it 13th July’s which was the day the serial blasts took place in Mumbai.
Like many people, I fell for falsehood and shared the wiki-link over Facebook as well as Google+ at the same time. After few hours, when the error on Wikipedia was resolved, Google+ shared link preview showed corrected date of birth while Facebook link-preview still showed the wrong date of birth.
You can see screenshots below:
Facebook Link Cache
Google+ Link Cache
Is this a big deal?
No. Not at all IMHO. But it certainly shows the care with which Google+ has been designed! 😉
When Google revealed its new social project, namely Google Plus and everyone wanted to be invited to the party. That’s how Google has usually rolled out services since they launched Gmail. When Gmail was newly launched by Google, having a Gmail account became quite important for people.
If interest and exclusivity are benchmarks, then Google + is scoring high. I have used Google+ for a couple of days now and one thing I found missing on it was the lack of invitations.
Even now the go around for inviting people is to add them to Circles and then send them a message. Usually they should be able to sign up to Google Plus. But this is taking a lot of time, possibly because of overload.
A social network without your friends is boring!
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I used to be on Orkut a lot, about 5 years ago. I resisted Facebook thinking none of my friends are on it. Today almost everyone I know in life is on Facebook and all my friends who I would catch up on Orkut have either deleted their Orkut profile or like me do not check it more than once or twice a month.
Users need to have their friends get access to their photos and updates and leave their comments.
Google Plus does work around the problem by allowing ‘Sharing via email only” option which updates people via an email about stuff shared on the Google + account. This allows only viewing of updates and photos and email users cannot leave their comments.
Hopefully, Google+ rolls out invites very fast and stop faltering on this issue. Remember what happened to Google Wave. It was a collaborative tool meant for teams. As individuals who got the invite could not find people they worked on Google Wave, they found it quite useless despite of Google Wave having some really cool features.
What do you think? Will the lack of invitations and too much exclusivity kill Google+ before it starts? Do drop in your comments.
Google has always, introduced new services either by rolling them out for everyone in one go or by invitation. It all started with Gmail, when it was launched, Google allowed people to use and create a new Gmail account only via invitations.
With Google Wave, it was the same and people clamored for invitations from friends and family along with some websites who offered invitations.
How Twitter reacted to Google Plus Invites!
Twitter is usually a good place to look up how much buzz a certain brand, product is creating. This is because, Twitter is open and not private at all.
According to Trendistic, About %1 of all tweets across almost 24 hours on Twitter had the word “Google” included in it. If Twitter gets about 190 million tweets per day, hence roughly about 1.9 million tweets had the word Google in it.
This is a remarkable way to increase word of mouth publicity but it has its pitfalls. When Google Wave was invite only based, it got a lot of negative publicity and that too spread word of mouth. This is markedly different from Apple, which never speak about a new product and lets the media do all the speculating which ends up being free publicity.
More about Google+ later when I land up an invite. 🙂 Do drop in your views and comments.
News Corp had bought MySpace, for a jaw-dropping price of $580 million. Today, News Corp has sold of MySpace for a surprisingly low price of $30 million. This makes it one of the biggest riches to rags story on the internet.
Specific Media, a company into online brand advertising has coughed up the $30 million for purchasing MySpace.
What will happen to MySpace?
The details are still not crystal clear, but it is certain that, MySpace will not survive as a social network. It might be adapted into a social advertising platform.
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MySpace music is also one very successful free music streaming services. It was probably one of MySpace’s biggest positive.
A case for not selling out!
When Facebook was still in its infancy and hardly popular, MySpace ruled to social networking world. It had a great buzz, but it died down particularly after being bought by News Corp.
Facebook founders never sold their company and we see how it has continues to grow rapidly with valuation in several billions.
Twitter have probably received offers to be bought, but Twitter founders have resisted. Going by how MySpace worked out after being acquired by a larger company, I guess they are doing the right thing.
What are your views on the MySpace sale? Do drop in your comments.
There is a popular cliché which is often repeated in the blogging world, that quote is “Content is King”. If content is king, then surely Google and Facebook control much of the kingdom. Both are used extensively by people for discovering new content.
Search engines led the way for a long time, but lately people are getting their news, sharing photos and information on group events on Facebook. Facebook has forayed into search by tying up with Bing creating something called “Social Search”.
Google Plus, will be probably be the last time Google gets to challenge Facebook as a social network. If they get this wrong, we can safely assume Google just cannot crack the ‘social’ code.
Is Google on the right track?
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Google actually has all services that Facebook offers. We can share videos on YouTube, send email and chat via Gmail and save our photos on Picasa. So why is Facebook so popular? The reason is that Facebook allows users to do all the sharing in one single place and with one single contact or friend list.
Google Plus will be on the right track if it can manage to bring all these services together but at the same time be simple and easy enough to use.
The answer to the question if Google will crack the social code, only time will reveal. But at here is a video about circles which is a feature of Google Plus.
If you want a demo of visit their official site and sign up to be invited. Google Plus will be rolled out gradually to all users.
Do you think Google Plus will be real competition to Facebook? Do drop in your comments.
Almost any page I visit online now a days, I come across three buttons on every page. These buttons are retweet, FB Like and FB share buttons. This proves how traffic on the internet has also become social and is not just controlled totally by search algorithms.
This meant people were now discovering new content thanks to their friends on social networks and not necessarily through search results. Google had announced that it will have some sort of a social layer on all its products. Today Google unveiled +1 feature which is very similar to Facebook’s “Like” feature.
Try out Google’s +1 with your search results
Sign –in to your Google account while using Google search
This will start showing search results on Google with the option to click on +1 (see image).
The links you select as +1 will show up even in your Google profile.
Here is the video that explains Google +1:
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Future plans for Google’s +1
Google will soon start allowing web-pages to add a +1 button so that people can click on this button.
This will mean +1 will become a rival of Facebook’s “Like” button.
This is the first time I feel Google is really taking “social” seriously. Only time will tell if Google has hit a jackpot or if it has hit a dud like it did with Google Buzz.
Do try out Google +1 and let me know your views and opinions. Do drop in your comments.
Should prisoners be allowed to tweet, update their status messages or search their space ? One South Carolina state lawmaker says, absolutely not, and he is trying to make it punishable by law if they are caught using social media sites.
Inmates are accessing social networking sites from inside the prison using their smartphones which are smuggled inside the prison walls. Prisoners do not update their status or videos but some use it for threatening their victims through messages or stalking them.
The bill to stop social networking for prisoners would add 30 days to a prisoner’s sentence and require them to pay a $500 fine if they are caught posting on social networking sites. Well, I don’t understand why aren’t they trying to stop the illegal supply of smart phones inside the prison? If they do not get any phone they wont threat any one!
Let’s see if this bill passes and something is done! What is your view on this ? Share it with me here.
A lot has been written about search going social. It has even prompted Google to add social layers to its products across the board. While Google does that and keeps us guessing what their plans are, there are some interesting changes with Google profiles.
I was looking up my Google profile after a long time and noticed that I could add 6 different social networks to my Google profile.
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How to add accounts to Google Profile!
First you need a Gmail account. If you have used Gmail, your profile exists. Visiting it by typing in http://google.com/profiles
Sign-in to your account and look up Account Settings from the extreme top right hand corner. The option looks somewhat like a wheel from a gear.
Now check up connected accounts and simply add your social profiles to these. You can visit http://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts directly if you are already logged into your Gmail account.
At the moment the big difference after you add these accounts it when you carry out social search queries on Google. But when it comes to the profile, the added accounts show up as not so different from the other links you can add manually. This probably means Google is looking to do something different with accounts from these social media.
I wonder if Google is planning to build a super social network in the form of Google Profiles, which allows us to manage and look up all our social presence from one place.
Also Google does not treat social profiles as real people but just another link. This might be a way to tying up those links! What are your views?
Twitter has become a great tool to promote or spread a particular startup, a blog article or a web business in general. To make your tweets reach out to more people, a new web app called Timely.is helps you to schedule and post your tweets at an optimum time.
What is Timely.is?
Timely.is is a new web app developed by the startup Flowtown Inc., which can be used to schedule your tweets for later. It works on an algorithm, which finds out the time of maximum impact at which your tweet will be read by the most number of users.
As seen below, I simply entered my Twitter username, and Timely suggested 4 time frames, in which I could reach out to the most users.
How Does Timely.is work?
Timely.is analyses 199 of your previous tweets, and calculates optimum time frames using their algorithm.
To get started with Timely, you have to sign-up and authorize Timely with your Twitter account. You will then be able to schedule tweets as shown above (Click to enlarge).
By clicking on Add to Queue, your tweets get added to a list of tweets each of which will be posted at the time of most impact. You can check the statistics of your tweets as well.
If it is an urgent tweet, you can click on Post within 30 minutes, so that Timely will choose the best time in the next 30 minutes.
Since this is a fairly new web app, the accuracy of Timely’s algorithm is not certain. Do give me your feedback about this newly launched web-app through your comments 🙂
In today’s Social-Media oriented world, if a person can himself chose the content that he wants on a newspaper, one might prefer reading a digital newspaper over a conventional one.
Paper.li, is a useful web app, which can be used to create your own newspaper of Twitter and Facebook updates.
Paper.li is a service introduced by a Swiss startup called SmallRivers, which can make your Twitter and Facebook streams appear to be like a newspaper. All you have to do is connect to your Twitter or Facebook account and create your own newspaper within seconds !
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You can chose the content you want on the paper by selecting a search term, and paper.li will search for all articles,videos and images that contain that particular term on Facebook or Twitter (Two different newspapers can be created for Facebook and Twitter).
You can create a paper for a Twitter hash tag, a Twitter List, or your own Twitter username.
About creating a Facebook paper, you can do so by entering a popular term, and providing keywords.
The newspaper can be given a unique name, of which you become the editor-in-chief, and the people who share the links to that particular topic become the contributors.
Here is a screen shot of a Facebook paper I created titled ‘Egypt’ alongside the #India Twitter paper. Click to enlarge.
As you can see, the paper.li app looks for updates of the particular topic that has been chosen. I really found the look and appearance of paper.li to be well designed and user friendly.
Some drawbacks
paper.li allows thedisplay of ads on the paper. Since its a digital newspaper, ads should be minimum or should not be present at all.
You cannot create more than 10 papers per user. When you try to create more than 10 papers the following notification appears.
Although you can tweet each article on the Twitter newspaper, individual articles cannot be ‘Liked’ on the Facebook paper.
Paper.li is updated on a 24-hour basis just like real newspapers, so no real-time updates can be received on your paper.
Alternatives:
Tweeted Times is a good web app which can be used to view any Twitter feed in the form of a newspaper. You can ‘Like’ all individual Facebook posts unlike paper.li.
PostPostis yet another popular Facebook stream newspaper which has an amazing layout. All the content on your Facebook News Feed is displayed in a beautiful manner on postpost.
Do try out paper.li as well as the alternatives stated above. Would you read something like paper.li every single day? Dont forget to drop in your opinions 🙂
