Google + has been around us for quite some time and all of us have already added it to our to-do-list because we cannot run the risk of being targeted by Google. Google has already reiterated the fact that the future of search might be governed by social presence of a website and users’ behavior rather than only links and what is the better way to make people talk about your brand and your company in general than having a great social presence. But the problem is that we, marketers, are already having enough of this social presence. First it was Facebook and its innumerable clones but thankfully all of them doomed to perish. Then came the great Twitter and we had to move on to it though quite reluctantly. We all started twittering on the hope that Google will give us some kind of preference when it comes to ranking but lol. The relationship suddenly strained and we are left with no choice but to maintain our twitter account on the hope that probably Bing might shower her blessing. But so far, as far as the opinions of the experts are concerned, nothing seems happening of that kind.
Google + A Success: Probably not. Think this way, if Google + were a success, Google would not probably promote that thing through search engine. It is a rather shameless promotional campaign, asking people become a member of Google + by using an arrow. People who do not even have any idea of what social network means click onto them and eventually find them enmeshed with the intricacies of Internet or more particularly social networking. However, you have reasons to disagree with me given the fact that Google + has been growing at a rapid pace but the truth is that, people are less active in Google + and some are even scared that Google might sneak into their private space. Privacy has always been a major issue with Google and this is probably the main thing why people are dragging their feet when they are to share something personal in Google +.
Google + For Business: This is hard to believe but this is true. Google is well aware of the fact that unless they force the webmasters into submission and use their new product, the entire effort might go bust like – Google Wave. So, they voluntarily integrate Google + report in Google analytics so that webmasters can have a clear idea of how many people have plused their post or how many retweets a particular article have gained. Unlike Facebook’s whose solely focused on giving people a chance to interact with their friends, Google is definitely treading a different path by trying to educate people about social networking and I fear this is not going to work.
Why It Might Turn Into a Disaster: The thing is that it appears to be very much business like and its interface and its functionalities are all quite predictable, if not similar with facebook. Personally, I had high hopes on Google but when I checked out Google +, it looked like another clone of facebook with little tweaks here and there but they are so crudely done, a novice can even find them out easily.
It lacks Wow effect and what’s more, Google is really finding it hard to make people engaged here and which is why they are promoting it desperately because Google cannot afford to have another failure product in its kitty.
Author bio:
Stephen O’Neill is a passionate writer and he has written different article on web design, online marketing and SEO. He is equally enthusiastic about latest gadgets.
The Pink Panther has been sneaking around the social media scene recently, but not in the form of the pink cat we all know and love. The Pink Panther has taken the shape of Google Plus. The network finally opened its’ gates to the public by crafting a huge arrow from the search bar, to the Google + button.
If we followed the melody line that created the Pink Panther theme, we are taken directly to Facebook, the one thing stopping Google Plus becoming the leading social network. We should all be aware of the fact that Facebook has very recently release a tonne of new features and put them all together in a new layout, no doubt an attempt to keep Google Plus at bay,
Google is primarily a search engine, with an extremely complex algorithm that no one, besides Google, knows 100%. That said, they must be able to put together some ideas about Facebook and how to beat them. When Facebook decides to update the platform with new features or a layout, the users are never happy and always complain. Google obviously cottoned on to this and realised that this is the perfect opportunity to bag some extra users in the epic war between the two networks.
We must ask if Google has done enough for their network. Ok, they have 50 million users now and considering that they have only recently been released to the public, which is astonishing. However, all they have really done in terms of developing the network is updating the features slightly, nothing new has been added. What was already available in the somewhat primitive versions of Google Plus are still available now. They are finer tuned than what was previous, but nothing new has been added, especially if you compare G+ to FB, seen as Facebook added tonnes of new features which have mostly likely been caused by Google.
The big G hasn’t really done much to advertise the network either, all that has been done is they added an arrow to their homepage, which came down on Googles’ 13th birthday anyway so it was only visible for a few days. This arrow is not extensive advertising and we all know Google could do much better. Besides the arrow, the only other form of advertising has been left to the users of Google Plus.
So why has Google done this? The one and only reason is Google wants its networkers, or those with potential, to be hooked by the slow rise of buzz about Google Plus. Once they are hooked, they will be more inclined to snoop around the social network and slowly get to grips with it. Then when they finally have the hang of it, they will see for themselves the differences between G+ and FB, or whatever platform they were using.
Google have taken the country lane to get to its destination of being the top social network. They want the journey to be slow, enjoyable, and most importantly a natural route. To the present, it has seen 50 million users join the ranks of Google +, so we must play the waiting game to see if it becomes as dominant as it has become as a search engine.
There is a new buzz in the world of internet activity with rumors of fresh competition for some of the popular social networking sites of the world. The new focus for everyone hooked up on the internet is Google Plus. A new venture from one of the most sought after search engines of the internet Google Plus promises to be much more than just a social networking site for everyone. There was a lot of anticipation and patient waiting for millions of enthusiasts all over the world until recently when the doors were finally opened for all to create their profiles and accounts. There is a unique assembly of features the website withholds as a promise of an entirely new level of social networking experience. It can be also referred to as the +1 experience.
The first aspect that comes to your view when you log in is the classifications of people you know – there are friends, family, acquaintances and so on. You can always arrange your list of entries according to the level of your knowledge of them as well as your inclination to share with them. For instance you would always like the idea of sharing your college picnic photos and videos with friends more than relatives and acquaintances; in the same way there are close friends and others with whom you would rather keep a distance; there is no default feature here and everything can be customized just the way you want. Share all your videos and photos with people you wish and exchange theirs as well. There is no breach of privacy at any point as there is no access. In fact this is one of the biggest advantages among several others that Google Plus has offered its users.
Google Plus is not merely about friends and fun; there is much more to it than leisure. Here you can organize your professional acquaintances and colleagues in a separate category with whom you can communicate. You can exchange work related links and other relevant information as well as share each other’s professional experiences. This can be a handy tool for important information circulation as well; smartphone apps enable you to remain in constant touch with everyone and allow updates and likewise receive the same as well. If you are in the mood for some personal moments of your own recreation avail Google Sparks – this is a feature that caters to all your personal interest areas. From music, films to adventure, and sports there is all kinds of updates available here.
Google Plus hangout is where you can watch all your favorite videos and music files from youtube or even video chat with your friends. The most interesting aspect about video chat here is the multiple chat calls that can be accessible from your account at the same time. You can talk to as many as five to ten people all at the same time through video interactions.
Unbelievable but true – this is indeed a new beginning for social networking.
Today Google celebrated its 13th birthday by quietly adding the Google doodle to its homepage; the doodle isn’t animated and highlights the big G’s! approach to birthdays.
Google has been with us for 13 years now and it has grown from a small, privately funded start up, and has become possibly the biggest publically traded corporation that is the kingpin of the internet. Google isn’t just a huge search engine either; it has provided many services such as maps, news and recently social networking. Google no longer has to battle for traffic with the likes of Yahoo! And Ask Jeeves, the big G owns roughly 65% of American search traffic and 90% worldwide. Google has become a name that everyone knows and the phrase “Google it” is an answer we have all used for a difficult question.
Looking back into how much Google has progressed and expanded not only as a search engine, but as a wide range of services. The question must be raised, what does the future hold for Google? They could create a completely new service within Google that has never been seen before, they could refine Google + and take Facebook down thus, becoming not only the alpha male of search engines, but the pack leader of social networking.
We must all be patient and wait to see what Google pulls out of the hat next, maybe this time next year we will be wondering where they got that revolutionary idea from.
Some people may have been slightly confused when Google announced that it had bought out Motorola Mobility for a cool $12.5 billion. It’s important to remember that Google knows what they are doing, otherwise they would never have grown to become one of the biggest companies in the world – and this decision was well thought out. Their decision for buying Motorola is simply for clearing possible obstacles that they may have come across in the future.
The rise in mobile technology is something that Google has been following and getting involved in. With Google’s Android, they have already made their mark on close to half of the smart phones in the United States alone. And with Apple and Microsoft having purchased patents related to mobile devices (costing in the region of $4.5 billion), it was vital that Google secured a number of those important patents themselves – which is something they have acquired in the takeover of Motorola. This alone would have made this big-money move worthwhile, but there are a number of other benefits that will come with it. These moves have all come in preparation of a war for dominance in the mobile market.
The popularity of smart phones and tablet computers has revealed that the future of the internet lies in this industry. More and more people are accessing the internet via these devices, and the ability to control the experience through hardware and software is extremely important. Apple enjoys this control with its iPhone and this surely would have played a part in Google’s thinking before they made their biggest purchase so far. Another important point in regards to this is the experience that Motorola has in terms of hardware. Over the last decade, Motorola has produced a number of ground-breaking mobile phones and distributed their product around the world. This is something Google has never had to do as their only focus has been in software.
Motorola took to the Android platform straightaway and with the acquisition, they have tweaked the open source operating system to get the best out of it. All the big shots in Google have already discussed the importance of the web on mobile devices and you can be sure that their decision to buy Motorola will surely pay off in the long run. A worrying aspect for many of the other mobile companies now will be – will Android be available to them in the future, or will Google keep their creation for themselves?
Jason Acar is an online content writer and thought it would be interesting for him to write about his latest experience with domain registration and web hosting.
After a good few months of putting up with the frantic hype surrounding Google+, it seems that even the tech giant’s own chief executive is losing vital interest in the platform.
Critics of the site have been quick to notice that Larry Page hasn’t posted publicly from his Google+ profile in over a month. This observation comes hot on the heels of the news that less and less users seem to be interacting via the social network. Australian web app developer 89n have published a little research into the posting trends of Google+, the majority of which has been tracked by their very own Twitter management system, ManageFlitter. Keeping tabs on the number of people who integrate their Google+ account with their Twitter feed, 89n have found that the number of posts published per day has decreased by an alarming 41%, a statistic that will no doubt prick up the ears of marketers and bloggers alike.
It has to be said, however, that this technology does not track the amount of private posts that have been shared between users in this particular timeframe. So, it could simply be that Google+ profilers are more inclined to take advantage of the Circles feature and are particularly fussy about which of their friends they share information with.
Alongside the development of this morbid trend, SocialMediaToday.com have investigated the reach of celebrity fan pages within Google+, and despite many of the world’s most high-profile names reaching a commendable number of fans in a relatively short space of time, it seems that the average interaction with the fan (or ‘brand’) page is relatively small. Put simply, the number of people who are willing to go out of their way to comment, +1 or share information about that particular celebrity is dwindling. This could either signify that marketing moguls aren’t doing enough to engage their audience in the first place, or the initial hysteria surrounding Google+ is crashing so fast that many users don’t see the value of interacting with the platform anymore. No doubt these are sobering times for Google, who have been delighted at the success of their project so far – the platform currently boasts over 20 million users throughout the globe. Time will tell if these numbers are purely the result of a one-time fad, or whether Google+ really does have the potential to outshine its closest rivals, including, of course, Facebook and Twitter. The spike of the downward trend of interest in Google+ will certainly affect the work of SEO companies and online marketers, all of whom have had to introduce new marketing strategies and adjust their campaigns since it came into existence.
In a move that boosts the profile of Google+ even further, it’s been announced today that all three of the UK’s major party leaders, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and of course Prime Minister David Cameron have signed up for personal accounts, joining the 25 million or so existing members who’ve been quick to test out the new phenomenon for themselves.
Google+ has been a hot topic with bloggers since its launch in June, even though it still currently exists in its beta state and the registering system is strictly invite-only. The network faced criticism early on for its refusal to allow businesses or celebrities to create brand-focused pages yet insists that the political figureheads’ profiles are entirely personal and not intended as a means of publicity.
Cameron has been quick to post his reasons for joining the site, informing users that he is ‘proud to see British politicians leading the way when it comes to embracing new methods of engaging people online, from e-petitions to the latest developments in social media’. Clegg and Miliband quickly followed suit, explaining the importance of connecting with voters and embracing new technology, with the Labour leader citing that he was ‘determined for Labour to look outwards, not inwards’.
Google has faced criticism in the past for its alleged political stance. The corporation has been criticised in the past for showing an uncomfortable number of links to the Conservative party. Eric Schmidt, the company’s CEO, also works as a prominent economic adviser for Cameron.
The politicians have joined the hype-written Google+ as interest remains high, but many are concerned that over time their interest in the network will wane. Google’s UK managing director, Matt Brittin, is pleased to see the party leaders ‘embracing new innovations’ and praises their efforts to lead the political world when it comes to ‘new innovations in citizen engagement’.
It takes a lot to power an organisation as all-encompassing as Google. The company, based in Mountain View in California, run a vast amount of programmes and products alongside their search engine division, so it’s hardly surprising that they’ve been keen to keep their energy consumption figures under wraps for a number of years.
Figures released this week indicate that Google used a whopping 2.6 million megawatt-hours of electricity during 2010 alone, most of which is assumed to power the tens of thousands of servers that drive its data management services. This figure is the equivalent of 25% of the power generated by a typical nuclear power station and eventually amounts to 1.5 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions.
However, although these statistics may sound shocking in the first instance, experts are encouraging us to consider Google’s attempts to offset their emissions by spending over $80 million on clean energy solutions such as solar and wind power. The company is proud of its responsible image and looks to be doing as much as possible to improve its consumption. For starters, their complex in California boasts vast solar panels and they frequently purchase good-quality carbon offsets in a bid to eliminate a large amount of their emissions. They have also previously announced their ambitions to draw at least 35% of their total energy from ‘clean’ power sources by 2012.
You may be surprised to learn that Google have become a leading innovator in the development of energy-conscious cooling equipment for their data servers, which has been demonstrated by the recent installation of a seawater-based cooling system at an information plant in Hamina, Finland.
Industry experts believe that the service provided by Google is enough to justify their energy bills. Many have claimed that the ease and convenience of search engine platforms saves individuals having to search elsewhere for answers, therefore cutting down on transport use. A relatively small argument in defence of the corporation but an argument none the less. And, once Google’s consumption level is spread equally across the millions of users worldwide, each individual ‘consumer’ only uses 180-watt hours on a monthly basis, which equates to the energy required to power a standard light-bulb for about three hours.
Although at first glance it seems that Google are contributing to the global environmental crisis on a massive scale, by delving a little deeper it seems that the firm are fully committed to lessening their carbon footprint and convincing similar-sized companies to start taking responsibility for their energy consumption. Many still argue that the crux of energy consumption comes from domestic and commercial usage, not the operations of some of the world’s largest businesses, as previously thought.
As announced in an official post published via Google’s blogspot, the company are looking to shut down a number of their self-funded projects, many of which have acted as a basis for experiments involving exciting new technology. The move follows the recent cuts of programmes such as Google Labs and the company’s leading newspaper archiving project, and the loud rumours of a shake-up that began circulating in July this year. Larry Page, the company’s CEO, reportedly wants to streamline Google’s output and put out-of-date products to rest to save resources and focus the firm’s energy on so-called ‘high impact’ products, ie those that considerably improve the users’ experience. Many experts believe that Page’s decision was inspired by the rapid success of Google+, the organisation’s ever-growing social network platform that was launched a couple of months ago.
Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President and author of the post in question, states that a number of features from each of the projects will simply be transferred to existing products. Despite this consolation, the move has come as a huge blow to those who used the projects to push innovative ideas and create useful applications for users worldwide. Google’s executives also mention that the majority of employees working on these developments will be moved to better-funded -projects that will (hopefully) generate a better return for the organisation, but hesitate to promise new jobs for everyone.
Several high-profile platforms have fallen victim to the cuts. Aardvark, a social tool that allowed users to find answers to a particular question by tapping into the knowledge of your friends and their acquaintances, was one of the first projects to be ditched. Image Labeler, Notebook and Google Web Security users will be told that these applications will be shutting down and the innovative Sidewiki toolbar will soon be discontinued too.
The move marks the end of an investigational era for Google. Google itself has pioneered several of the standard web applications we use every day and provided inventors and developers with an opportunity to share their ideas and work together to form platforms with stunning potential.
Here at SEO Positive, we can’t believe it’s been so long since Google released its innovative Chrome browser. Yet the company have released an official blog announcing that it was three years ago to the day that the Windows beta version of Chrome was launched to the world.
We’ve already touched upon the benefits of Chrome for the everyday surfer (see our previous post CompareTheBrowser.com). Its speed, efficiency and stability proved to be a refreshing addition to the browser market, and users were impressed by the implementation of a number of important yet previously unreleased developments. Couple these features with the advantages of an open-source programme and it seemed that nobody could fault Google for their latest release. Despite initial limitations (it took a little while for the system to become available to Mac and Linux users), by year two the browser had been re-tweaked and re-developed by Google’s engineers at a rapid rate to ensure that interest in the platform was sustained.
Microsoft believed that their latest offering, Internet Explorer 8, would overshadow Chrome’s release, but the sheer labour and resources that were thrown into the development of Chrome ensured that the platform outshone all competition and has stood the test of time.
This is mainly due to the dedicated team of developers behind the browser, whose sole aim is to improve usability and ensure that browsing the internet is as simple and effortless as possible for users of all skill levels and computing experience. Release cycles are still being pushed extensively by the group, with new versions and features being launched every six weeks or so.
As a company constantly driving change within the web market, Google have succeeded in producing a web interface that has been both well-received by the everyday user and praised by professionals around the globe. And with the recent success of Google+, the company’s social network beta, industry leaders are keeping a close eye on the firm to try and determine exactly what they’re going to think of next!
