Tasha Harrison

A couple of weeks ago Google launched their new social network, Google Plus. Despite users only being able to join by invitation from other users, the number of people on it quickly grew to 10 million.

What is Google Plus?

Google Plus works in much the same way as Facebook at first glance. You have a news stream with the latest updates from the people you follow or are friends with. It look’s a lot simpler in fact and the layout is clearer. You follow people by putting them into circles which means you can organise people into groups. This enables you to send an update to a limited number of people by only sending it to a particular circle.

You also don’t need to necessarily be friends with someone to follow them, meaning that it is a lot more like Twitter in many ways. One of the joys of Twitter can be just to watch people and follow people who share and find fantastic information.

Is it going to be better than Facebook?

There are many ways that Google Plus is better than Facebook. The circles feature means that you no longer have to fear saying inappropriate things with work colleagues or family members. It makes it easier to mix your work life with your private life. This means that it reflects how your actual groups of friends and acquaintances work, rather than treating all as equal as Facebook does.

The only thing that will trip up Google Plus is if people don’t take to it. Although the number of users is growing quickly, it will interesting to see whether the majority of people make the move. At the moment most users are still using Facebook and Twitter, mainly because their friends and followers are established there.

I can’t see Google Plus being a success unless it replaces either Twitter or Facebook – personally I’d like it to replace Facebook.

On February 22nd a massive earthquake struck Christchurch causing massive damage and killing many people. As the international media covered the event, Google did what they do best – created an easy and effective way for people to find the information they needed. Complete with resources including emergency numbers, missing person finder, map, updated news and video, as well as real time responses from Twitter.

The beginning of this year has been all about question and answer site Quora. Having put aside some time this morning to have my first peek I have to admit that it is a fun site. A little like a cross between Yahoo! Answers and Reddit, it enables users to debate a question in an organised fashion, commenting on answers and approving or disapproving them.

Launched last May as a beta, Quora has exploded in the last week or so, but I was nervous to get involved – there is already limited time in the day to interact on the social networks I am involved in. The immediate function that struck me was how easily it integrated into my existing social networks on Facebook and Twitter. It followed all my Twitter friends who are already using it. No need to build a brand new network and already lots of things to look at. (This is a common aspect of most social networks now.)

The problem Quora will have is that it is very time consuming. The benefit of both Facebook and Twitter is that they can run in the background of your life and you can check in as and when. Quora requires indepth reading and so takes up a lot more time – half an hour flew by this morning. This is fine, but it means that many people will fade away as the novelty wears off and other distractions take it’s place.

So yes, it is just another social network. It won’t replace Twitter, since it’s not really a place to have a chat as well as share information. I suspect people will talk about it and how to share links to enhance SEO etc, but there will be limited effectiveness.

For further reading on this I strongly recommend Dave Chaffey’s article on iMedia:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/28289.asp

If you use Twitter then you will no doubt have come across the Twitter Fail Whale:

This image is met by a number of emotions – derision, annoyance, frustration and fondness. The way in which Twitter has developed has meant that they have gone through periods where they can’t handle the quantity of traffic, so users are shown the whale. As with so many aspects of Twitter, it is the users who coined the term ‘Fail Whale’, rushing to other social media sites to discuss the fact that Twitter was down and what they would do. Such is the obsessiveness that users feel for the site that this image has become something of an icon.

Now other sites are trying emulate the success of failure, by attempting to create their own fail pages. Here is the fail page for the new Digg that I came across this morning:

I’m not convinced that Digg’s users have the same obsessive fondness to make this page iconic, but what other great fail pages are there?

The outcome of Murdoch’s paywall experiment with the Times will have a huge impact on journalism. I have spent a lot of time changing my mind about whether Murdoch is a genius or has lost touch with modern media. Finally, the paywall is here.

Today Murdoch was full of praise for tablets and, inparticular, Apple’s iPad, stating that they are ‘a perfect platform’ to read news on. This is true and it is almost certainly the future for most newspapers once the paper format is extinct. The Guardian iPhone and iPad app is one of the best examples of this.

This leads me to think that Murdoch is actually very clever. He does understand modern marketing and the internet. He also understands business and the need to make money. While many journalists and newspaper owners are happy to watch and hope that it works, Murdoch is busy actually doing it. For someone who had the foresight to be the first to enter the satellite television market with just a few thousand viewers, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to forming future trends.

For more analysis of the data and how it’s going read this: http://www.beehivecity.com/newspapers/times-paywall-more-analysis-of-the-data191807/