Google+ Now Available to All

Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, today took to the company’s official blog to post about Google+’s newest added features, numbered 92-100, respectively. The biggest news out of his rather longish list was really the 100th: as of now, anybody who wants one can sign up for a Google+ account, that’s with or without an invitation from a peer with more social media diligence.

If Google is really intent about catching up with Facebook’s accumulated 750 million users, opening its social network to everyone is a move in the right direction because unlatching the floodgates is bound to do much in terms of bridging the remaining gulf.

Also announced were a Google+ search feature, new tools for screen sharing, shared doodling, and a rattle of tweaks for Hangouts — these last can now be named, accessed through mobile phones, and recorded and broadcast live. The fresh cherry on top is that Hangouts APIs have also been released. Google+ has been out for less than 90 days, so all this amounts to more than one daily improvement that’s been introduced since day número uno.

Gundotra’s post also touched on Google’s newfangled — and still challenging — focus: “bring[ing] the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software.”

Read More:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/google-opens-up-to-all-comers/?ref=technology

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html

Google Hands Out Badges to Competitive Readers

This week Google is keeping its social momentum going by setting free onto the web its new Google News badges. It’s definitely a social feature for those who like to share, and let’s just say it out right, brag a little about all the stuff they read. Yes, for these folks, badges that track reading and prominently display to others their “badge level” are just the thing. The badges are sharable among Google contacts.

The reader-rank system uses badges that cover many topics. According to Natasha Mohanty, the author of the Google Blog post that revealed the news, there’s more than 500 types of badges for competitive readers to collect. Among those categories, readers can aspire to reach, in descending order, Ultimate, Platinum, Gold, and Silver levels on any given subject.

Google dishes out the badges to users who do their politics, sports, and other daily fare reading through Google News and have their web browser history enabled; it’s also necessary for readers to be logged into their Google accounts while they tire their eyes out a bit.

Google, once again stressing its hard-earned user-privacy sensitivity, is letting people know that the badges are “private by default,” which is another way of saying that they’re going about the introduction of their new features in way that’s very unlike Facebook. Even once users opt to share their badges, the specific articles they’ve read to achieve their status will remain private.

Read More:

http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/shareable-google-news-badges-for-your.html

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/google-launches-sharable-news-badges-for-google-news-readers.html

Privacy Revolution @ Google+?

Although Google+ has been greatly lauded for tackling (and side-stepping) certain privacy issues that have plagued Facebook for the eons it’s been since its 2004 inception, what is actually being referred to here is a revolution of social networking heads of state. More specifically, the fact that Larry Page, Vic Gundotra, and Sergey Brin, all three top-billing execs at Google, and numbers two, three, and four, respectively, on the Google+ rankings, have upped their privacy settings by concealing the number of people they have in Circles (friends) and the number of people that follow them. By concealing the numbers, they’ve lost their place on the rankings.

No one is thinking this is a coincidence, most especially because Google+’s most popular user, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had the idea to change his Google+ account’s privacy settings at the exact same time and in the exact same way as the Google captains. There’s no official word about what prompted the apparently unified front to act as it did, or how Zuckerberg benefits from relinquishing a prized number one spot on his big competitor’s network. Nathan Olivarez-Giles, who covers the Los Angeles Times’ tech beat, is positing that the privacy revival at Google+ might be Google’s attempt to bring “content and interaction” into focus instead of “popularity,” which in some ways is at the very heart of Facebook. But his theory still doesn’t explain Zuckerberg’s involvement.

As things stand, the new number one is the technology writer Robert Scoble. (The new number five is Tom Anderson).

Read More:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/mark-zuckerberg-google-co-founders-hide-google-follower-friends-counts-fall-off-top-100-list.html

http://socialstatistics.com/

Google+ Running a Pilot Program for Business Profiles

Christian Oestlien, a Google+ advertising lead, published a blog post yesterday giving notice of Google’s policy of temporarily “discouraging” businesses and “non-user entities” like teams, locations, or organizations from joining its new social network. The reasoning behind the unexpected stance is that Google is working on the construction of an “amazing Google+ experience for businesses” that will be completed before the year is over.

To that end Google will be operating a pilot program on Google+ with selected marketing partners. Acknowledging that the way “users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands,” Oestlien said that Google wanted to “create an optimal experience for both.” In an appended video, he added that such an experience would include “rich analytics and the ability to connect [the Google+] identity to other parts of Google that businesses might use on a daily basis, like AdWords.”

In the meantime, Google will be taking down non-user profiles already up on Google+. While they wait for what’s coming, business and other entities not falling under the “user” category can go to http://goo.gl/zq95C to request inclusion in the pilot program.

It seems Google is finally figuring out how to express its new-found commitment to sociability in its products. Google+ is so far proving to be a big success, providing features comparable to Facebook’s and even many that improve on those of its much-touted rival.

Read More:

https://plus.google.com/105923173045049725307/posts/E3mVj6nskaX?tab=mX

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388192,00.asp

Google’s Very Own Facebook Is Out

If you’ve gotten an invitation, you can now start using Google+, which is Google’s still-in-development, but quite nifty, version of Facebook. It promises to give you one more place to make status updates, share last night’s scrumptious dinner pictures, see what your friends are up to, and let your boyfriend know that the two of you are definitely no longer an item. As a bonus, Google is throwing in some services like group video chatting and texting.

As things stand, Google+ is the search giant’s most pointed rebuttal to Facebook. It’s also Google’s most polished social networking service. Given the adverse fallout of its previous social networking belly dives — Buzz and Orkut, which engendered a punitive settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and zilch popularity, respectively — Google is being scrupulous about its new network’s sharing mechanisms. As the Official Google Blog takes pains to explain, sharing will not be done wholesale, but piecemeal through designated groups.

The New York Times was not alone in highlighting the following facts:

In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, versus 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.

Google knows it’s losing its once firm grip on the web’s information because a great deal of online data remains cloistered inside Facebook. Clearly in an attempt at differentiation, Google has left out Facebook’s infamous Friend moniker for the people you add to your groups. Other than that, it seems an awfully lot like Facebook and it can’t be too long before you get an invitation to try it out and compare.

Read More:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/technology/29google.html?_r=1&ref=technology

Google Map Maker Open to U.S. Contributors

Google is staying on track with its publicly stated goal to both deepen and broaden every social aspect of its offerings. First came the +1 announcement, which introduced a new search feature that makes it possible to give and view ratings of Google search results. Now, posted just this week on Google’s official blog, is news that folks in the U.S. will now be able to make cartographical contributions online.

“Today we’re opening the map of the United States in Google Map Maker for you to add your expert local knowledge directly,” wrote Lalitesh Katragadda, Google’s Map Maker Tech Lead, together with Manik Gupta, Product Manager. They continued, “You know your neighborhood or hometown best, and with Google Map Maker you can ensure the places you care about are richly represented on the map.” The new contributions — made via public editing — will be reviewed and approved by Google before being published. Google says that approvals for public contributions should take only a few minutes.

Map Maker made its first appearance halfway through 2008. It uses a browser-based interface and has proved itself beyond serviceable as a method for creating high quality maps in areas where very little online data was available. At last count, 183 countries had access to Map Maker. Maybe Canada will be next.

Read More:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383789,00.asp

http://www.betanews.com/article/Google-opens-Map-Maker-crowdsourced-mapping-for-US/1303251104

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/page/2/

You Can Still +1 It

On Google’s rosters, today marks the return of Larry Page as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Page previously held the position before Eric Schmidt took over in 2001. Larry Page, fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Schmidt all shared leadership duties.

Although to Google’s great — if awkwardly underplayed — chagrin it is not considered exactly a social media giant, it plays business chess with a rival who very prominently is: Facebook. And if Google’s struggling social media attempts do not position it as one, its aspirations and latent prowess certainly do.

It’s been less than a week since Google announced the gradual rolling out of +1, a tool to let Google Search users make and view recommendations alongside search results. In addition to being “digital shorthand for ‘this is pretty cool’,” +1 is also a tit-for-tat to Facebook’s Like button. Google’s version, billed as “the right recommendations, right when you want them,” is the latest effort by Google to include the apparently dispersed, but rich, social content it possesses in its search results — its best asset and what it’s truly known for.

Google has been experiencing a mixed-bag season. Most announcements of Larry Page’s taking the baton once again evidence a sort of rejoicing by company insiders. The newspapers say people believe Page will inject the “start-up feeling” again.

But the newspapers have also been busy covering the legal, political, and public relations strife that Google has recently had to face. Like having arrived at a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission about its social network Buzz, in which Google not only accepted that Buzz “violated its own privacy promises,” but also agreed to undergo “regular privacy audits” for the next 20 years. That was last week.

Today, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court published its ruling stating that Google has to take measures to ensure the anonymity of people whose faces and license plates appear in Google Street View.

But in better news, last year alone, and demonstrating the robustness of its pockets, Google paid $1.8 billion for 48 companies, Slide, a social media company, was one of them.

For more information:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/1s-right-recommendations-right-when-you.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12956709

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-page-20110402,0,6233840.story

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/04/04/international/i082729D69.DTL#ixzz1IaEAPAdU

Google Announces Google Buzz

PC World reports that Google announced a new social media tool on Tuesday called Google Buzz that is designed to link people’s Gmail accounts with features found in popular social media tools including Facebook and Twitter. Expected to be fully deployed within one week, Google Buzz allows people to share status updates, photos and videos with their network of friends.

“We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences),” wrote Gmail and Google Buzz Plus Project Manager Todd Jackson on the Google blog. “Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

However, rivals immediately jumped on Google Buzz as a misguided approach to social networking.

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

Google continues growth while Yahoo! And Bing drop

Google accounted for 71.08 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 3, 2009, according to Hitwise data. The search giant saw a one percent gain from last month, while both Yahoo! and Bing dropped in September from last month, down three percent from 19.96 percent to 16.8 percent and down five percent from 9.48 percent to 8.96 percent respectively. Surprisingly, Ask.com showed a big increase of eight percent, from 2.37 percent to 2.56 percent of the market early in October.

In addition, Hitwise revealed that one-word queries accounted for the majority of all searches, amounting to 24.32 percent of all queries. In addition, longer search queries, averaging searches of five or more than eight words in length, increased two percent between August and September 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 6 percent.

The findings also showed that search engines continue to be the main way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. In their share of traffic coming directly from search engines, Automotive, Business and Finance, Entertainment, News and Media, Online Video and Sports categories showed double-digit increases last month compared with September of last year.

Bing adds Real-Time Twitter to Search Results

As part of an effort to integrate real-time data into search results, Microsoft has announced that its one-month-old search engine Bing now includes the latest tweets of Twitter users. While Bing will not feature all of Twitter at this time, it will index a few thousand of the more prominent Twitterers based on their follower count and volume of Tweets. The list of Twitter users includes everyone from search technology journalist Danny Sullivan to people like Al Gore and Ashton Kutcher.

In a blog post about the announcement, general manager of Microsoft’s search technology center Sean Suchter wrote, “There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space.”

When Bing users search for people in association with Twitter, the search results will bring up their latest Tweets along with a quick link to more tweets. Users can type in queries such as “Ashton Kutcher Twitter” or “Ashton Kutcher tweets.”

This is a major step for Bing in terms of competing with search giant Google. The New York Times reported that while all major search engines index Twitter profiles and some older tweets, “Bing is the first major search engine that is integrating with Twitter in this way.”

-Melanie Saxe

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