The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile, has joined Google Plus, and he's hosting a live Hangout tomorrow with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The conversation is part of the inaugural Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture in Cape Town, South Africa. It's an On Air Hangout, so there's no limit to the number of viewers.
The Hangout will be held tomorrow (Saturday, October 8) at 10:30 a.m. South African time (GMT +2:00). Unfortunately for U.S. readers, that's 4:30 a.m. Eastern, 1:30 a.m. Pacific. Google SVP Vic Gundotra says the video will be available shortly thereafter. You can follow the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Google Plus.
LinkedIn has launched status updates from companies. Administrators of company pages can post short updates just like individual users can. This provides companies with a way to engage followers and start conversations from within the public LinkedIn stream.
Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.
The Sociable just did a neat little study using Google's +1 Button Chrome extension and unearthed some surprising insights into the reach of Google's new stuff-liking button. Most of the sites that get +1s are social networking and tech sites; news and sports don't get much love.
Google's own sites get the most +1s, of course, but Facebook is actually closing the gap. While Google Plus has 43,000 +1s, Facebook has 41,000, and that's up from 36,000 a week ago. Most of the other top sites for +1s are stagnant, though, suggesting that use of the button isn't growing much outside of early adopters.
In a study of 300 hiring managers and recruiters, Palo Alto-based social networking monitoring service Reppler reports that 76% of hiring managers look at applicants' Facebook profiles. An additional 56% are looking at Twitter, and 48% check out LinkedIn - which seems ironic, considering that LinkedIn is where you're supposed to present your professional self.
Google Plus has enabled locking and closing of comments on posts before sharing. Users can now decide not to allow commenting or resharing before clicking 'Share,' instead of rushing to change the setting after the post becomes visible to others.
Engineer Ebby Amirebrahimi says this feature was added by popular demand. With today's opening of the API for search, comments and +1s, it's important that users have control over the conversations they start.
Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month.
Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?
One of the most controversial aspects of Facebook's re-design announcements last week was the introduction of "frictionless sharing." That's Facebook's term for when something you are reading, listening to or watching is automatically shared to your Facebook Timeline. Up till now, sharing on the social Web has largely been a manual process. You click a Facebook "Like" button, you click the "Check In" button in Foursquare, you click a button to "Re-Tweet" something. With Facebook's frictionless sharing, once you approve a media partner app, all of your activity in that app is automatically shared to Facebook. No need to click any buttons.
Frictionless sharing may well turn out to be a masterstroke by Facebook (I actually think it will). But because this is a relatively new concept, people rightly have concerns about it. In this post we'll review the pros and cons, so that you can decide for yourself whether to enable automated sharing.
"We're not a social network, we're an information network." That's what Twitter's vice president of engineering, Michael Abbott, told the crowd at Mobilize 2011 this week. That isn't new branding, Twitter has been denying it's a social network since at least a year ago. It all dates back to November 2009, when Twitter changed the question it asked users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?".
The trouble is, Twitter's main rivals Facebook and Google+ are not sticking to their knitting like Twitter is. Last week, Facebook widely expanded the range of information it tracks: read, listen, watch, 5 types of "life events" and more. Meanwhile Google+ has become known as a place for people to discuss common interests. This is all bad news for Twitter.
Big news on the Google Plus front. Circles, its way of organizing Plus-buddies into groups, just got much more useful. Google engineer Owen Prater just announced - where else? - on Google Plus that circles are now shareable, so users can share interesting groups of people with one another.
Since Google Plus launched in June, we've worried that keeping our circles organized might require too much effort, but the ability to share circles turns them into something well worth our while. Circles aren't just filters for us to selectively share our stuff anymore. Now they're conversations that can be shared far and wide.
The folks at Veracode put together this infographic that describes some of the more notable Twitter hacks, or "twacks," over the recent past. With the news that even venerable USAToday's account wasn't safe, it is interesting to see that Twitter has banned the most popular or obvious password combinations (including the evergreen '123456') from use. And yes, you can get even, as Justin Bieber did after his account was compromised, sending 26,000 texts to his tormentor. Shakira and Taylor Swift better watch their own passwords too!
