The Next MySpace: Facebook???

A shiny new social-networking site comes along and before you know it, we're all flirting with the frisky startup, leaving our dates back at the table to pay the check. At least, that's how it seems with Google+, the latest competition for our Facebook affections.

In just a few weeks, Google+ has enticed roughly 20 million people to join, according to Comscore. And that's before it's even officially debuted; you still have to be invited to go to this dance. Furthermore, while the service is still in pre-release mode, many of us using it have found it to already be simpler, slicker, and generally better at the social-networking waltz than Facebook (and it always lets you lead).

  

Uber-venture capitalist Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners recently argued that the social network war was over."The last 500 social companies funded by the venture capital community are all worthless," McNamee said during a presentation to a crowd of media types. As far as McNamee is concerned, the social platform has been established, and it's Facebook. He may be right. He has nearly 30 years experience investing in tech, including an early bet on Facebook. And Facebook, according to the company's own tally, has 750 million members.

Plenty of people have offered excellent reasons for abandoning Facebook, however. Some of my FB friends have already switched because changing networks is as simple as a mouse click, and there's no exit cost whatsoever -- indeed there may be several benefits.Many FB friends, for example, would rather switch than fight Facebook's ever-evolving privacy settings. Purposively convoluted, Facebook's pages of inscrutably marked multiple boxes have made it about as friendly as Windows Millennium Edition. So one day your chat line is closed, the next you're open online for everyone to see. It's created Facebook fatigue.

Then there's the grandma factor: If everyone is on Facebook, not only is it no longer cool but it also means I can't say anything without fear of retribution -- or being outed for playing beer pong by my boss or mom. That's no fun at all, and Google+ at least makes it easier to compartmentalize friends, acquaintances, and business associates (unlike Facebook's lists, which are a pain in the you-know-what). Some Google+ members are even creating "frenemy" circles (now there's an idea that's bound to get you in trouble).

There are two other important undercurrents to the rising tide boosting Google+: momentum and the nature of social circles.
The first issue looks ominous for Facebook when one looks back at the fall of MySpace. The switch from MySpace to Facebook seemed predicated on a number of factors. There was the shear clutter of MySpace, which looked like something out of an early GeoCities blog. It became a blinking, flashing, honking mess. And Facebook connected people and conversations more seamlessly. Perhaps more critical was the shear momentum of Facebook as it picked up speed, sucking in more and more friends until it became an irresistible social vortex. Now, Google+ looks poised to possibly do the same to Facebook, draining away members and eyeballs.

The second point is a lesson about social behavior. Switching from one network to another may just be an inevitable part of our social habits. Every once in a while, we simply need a change. No one can eat the same meal every day, and we can't visit the same bar or coffee shop every day without getting bored. Some folks have been on Facebook for nearly 7 years; that's a long time to be hanging out at the same watering hole. And what is it they say about the 7-year itch?So switching social circles may be preordained. And Google+ is simply the next hot hangout.

source: foxnews

New data suggests Google+ isn’t raining men: 34 percent of users are female

 

Despite many reports by major news organizations, about 33.6 percent of Google+’s total user base is female, according to new research by unofficial Google+ statistician and founder of Ancestry.com Paul Allen.


Allen, who earlier in the week accurately predicted that Google+ had surpassed 10 million registered members, determined his gender estimates using a method of analysis that is based on U.S. Census data about surname-popularity (the popularity of a person’s last name) and the number of Google+ users with each surname.

“The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being,” Allen wrote in a recent note on Google+.


Allen pointed at several media organizations — like Mashable, Adweek and Forbes — that reported Google+’s gender ratio as predominantly male using flawed data from personal research, SocialStatistics and FindPeopleOnPlus.“Google+ is quickly turning pink,” Allen said.


Other popular social networks, by comparison, are mostly dominated by women, according to a Pew report on social networking sites. The Pew data shows that females account for over half of all users on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and a collection of other less popular social sites . The data has a 2-3 percent margin of error.

The only social network with a male dominated user base is LinkedIn, according to the Pew data. However, Allen expects Google+’s female population percentage to surpass LinkedIn’s (which is 37 percent female) in early August 2011.Allen admits that he ignores the small percentage of people who decline to identify their gender on Google+ when determining his data. Still, his research method has, thus far, proved accurate.

Why did Google+ users get hit by a spam attack?

This weekend there was an 80-minute time period during which Google+ users were hit by an odd spam attack. They weren't simply annoyed by junk emails, but instead smothered by a pile of duplicate Google+ notifications. What went wrong?

According to Business Insider, the issue was the result of a technical hiccup — something which is to be expected given that the social networking service is still in "field trial" mode. Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, was quick to provide an apology for the troubles as well as a bit of a clarification in — what else? — a Google+ post:

Yes, laugh all you want, but even a service run by search engine giant Google can temporarily run out of disk space if its engineers underestimate just how popular it will become.Don't worry though: Whatever issues there were over the weekend appear to be resolved at this point, so we're assuming that someone at Google pulled a few switches and pushed a few buttons to allocate enough sufficient disk space to Google+ and its eager users.

Google dealing with privacy bugs in Google+

  

Google's new social networking site Google+, built to beat Facebook primarily on privacy features, has several privacy bugs the company is working to fix.While some enthusiastic beta testers clamor for Google to open the social networking site to everybody now, it's clear Google needs to address these issues before launching Google+ more broadly.

Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders.So far, beta testers have been mostly positive about Google+, particularly over its design to make it easier for users to share posts and content with different sets of people, as opposed with their entire list of contacts.

Many of the existing privacy bugs in Google+ revolve around the site's mechanism to block users, according to a list of known problems Google has published and is in the process of fixing.For example, after a user blocks someone, that blocked person may not always be removed from the user's extended circles and the blocked person's posts will remain on the user's activity stream.

Likewise, the user's posts made prior to the blocking will remain on the blocked person's stream.In addition, after blocking someone, a user could remain on the blocked person's circles, and the user may still appear on the blocked person's profile as being part of their circle. About the latter bug, Google wrote: "We're working hard to improve this experience."

Google is also working to address a number of non-privacy related bugs, such as the fact that the activity stream may not always get updated in real time and that users can't attach a comment to a comment in a nested fashion.In addition, when a user opens Google+, minimized chat windows from Gmail may re-expand and conversations in chat windows in Google+ or Gmail may not sync between each other.

On other news related to Google+, Google recently announced that as of July 31 of this year, all Google Profiles will become automatically public.Google users will be able to restrict the publicly available information to just their full name and their gender, and keep everything else hidden. People also have the option to delete their Google Profile.

Mark Zuckerberg may be the most followed person on Google+

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and face of Facebook, may be the most followed person on Google+ -- the social network from Google that is looking to be his biggest rival.Zuckerberg is listed as the most popular person on Google+, in terms of the number of people who follow his profile page, with a tally of 21,213 followers, according to the website Google+ Statistics.

The next most followed person, according to the site, is Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page, with 14,798 followers as of Tuesday morning. Vic Gundrota, who is leading Google's social media efforts, and Sergey Brin, who founded Google with Page, round out the top four, respectively.

The website TechCrunch was the first to report on the rankings from Google+ Statistics, which is built by the same Amsterdam-based team behind TwitterCounter, which tracks user popularity on Twitter.Zuckerberg's popularity on Google+, ahead of those leading Google's social media charge, can be seen at the same time as a bit funny and a bit embarrassing -- a competing CEO is more popular on Google's social network then its own leadership.

Though, it's not terribly surprising considering how well known Zuckerberg is due to massive amounts of media coverage of Facebook -- the world's most popular social network -- and its chief executive.Last year, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's person of the year. He also had a few high-profile TV interviews coinciding with a huge rise in celebrity after the Academy Award-winning film "The Social Network," based on his life and the start-up of Facebook, hit theaters

Google can't cope with demand for Google+

Google has suspended current users sending out Google+ invites, saying it has generated "insane demand".Vic Gundotra, the chap leading Google's social network charge, posted on Google+ that the firm had shut down the invite function due to high demand. He said, "We've shut down [the] invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!"

Curiously Gundotra also said that those wanting to leave could do so and take their data with them. Gundotra wrote in the same post, "For any who wish to leave, please remember you can always exit and take your data with you by using Google Takeout. It's your data, your relationships, your identity." Perhaps that statement is an indication of where Google wants to position Google+, giving the user greater ownership over their data that they put onto Google's servers.

Given the anger Google generated when it pushed its Buzz social networking software onto users, it's not surprising that the firm has taken a softly-softly approach with Google+. Google also might be accurately aware that it needs a smooth launch of Google+ and that, while suspending sign-ups isn't perfect, it is far better than having the system fall over due to high demand.

Google as always maintains that Google+ is still in a beta stage, with the firm still ironing out the kinks. David Valentine, general manager of UK and Ireland at Microfocus, a company that does load testing for a number of high profile firms told The INQUIRER, "poor website responses are bad for publicity".

Valentine said that websites are getting ever more complex, making particular reference to Ajax, a set of technologies that Google+ makes heavy use of and require more accurate load testing. Valentine said that users expect a web page to respond within one second and that "if a user gets half way through a transaction and it fails it could lead to that person leaving an angry comment on Facebook".

Google seems to have played it safe, and rather than risk having negative publicity about its ability to provide reliable service it has chosen to suspend the expansion of its social network. It's a wise decision, as the wait simply generates more hype for the firm.

As for Google+ itself, given Google's position as the dominant web brand with an immensely popular search engine, email service, advertising brokerage, web analytics and provider of mobile operating systems, there is actually a chance that it could challenge Facebook. Curiously, due to all those services, Google gets only an incremental increase in the amount of personal data and preferences it has access to with Google+.

With Google already highlighting that data can be removed from its servers using Google Takeout, something that Facebook doesn't offer, this could push Facebook to become slightly more transparent about the way it handles and retains users' data.

source:theinquirer