Looking for people to Circle on Google Plus? Several new sites have popped up with ideas for "suggested circles." Unfortunately, Google Plus itself doesn't offer a way for users to share Circles with their friends, so for now, manually reproducing these Circles is your only option. But for those who are willing to put in the time, you'll be hitting that 5,000 friend limit pretty quickly.
LinkedIn has just announced a Web plug-in that lets employers add a one-click "Apply with LinkedIn" button to job postings.
Apply with LinkedIn allows applicants to adjust their LinkedIn profile information to suit the position before they apply. After they submit, the confirmation screen displays people in the applicant's LinkedIn network who work at the company, allowing them to connect or ask for a referral.
Google Plus, the new social network from Google, has been rapidly expanding. But contrary to early perception, it isn't just being used by techies to talk about Google Plus. Trey Ratcliff is a well-known photographer and already Google Plus has become his main social platform - despite already having large fan bases on Facebook and Twitter. Trey, a leading exponent of the HDR photography technique (high dynamic range imaging), runs a very popular travel photography blog called StuckInCustoms.com.
I interviewed Trey about how he's using Google Plus and why he's not focusing so much now on Facebook and Twitter. Below are his responses, including facts and figures about Trey's social media accounts.
For a service that is only officially available on a single platform (iOS), Instagram sure is doing well. In less than 10 months of existence, the photo-sharing app has managed to gain 6 million users, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down.
While using the service is itself pretty straight-forward, it isn't always obvious how to build a substantial following. Most users won't attract thousands of followers overnight, but there are a few tips and tricks that can get you there eventually.
Security software and analysis company BitDefender is stepping up its product suite with the release its Total Security 2012 application. In terms of complete security coverage, not many companies put it all together the way BitDefender does, with features including Android security, a desktop application, coverage of Facebook and Twitter and even its own small Linux operating system with a built-in browser.
We wrote about Safego, BitDefender's Facebook security application, when it was released in public beta last October. Safego remains one of the only third-party security applications that protects users, more or less, from themselves. BitDefender does not plan on stopping at Facebook though as the company will release a Twitter security app within the next several weeks and have ideas for both LinkedIn and Google Plus. Social spam is on the rise, and BitDefender takes a novel approach to keeping users safe.
I admit: it's taken me a while to warm up to Google Plus. Several of our team were early enthusiasts, one or two suggesting that it may even replace their use of Facebook or Twitter. That got me wondering: how many Google Plus users are spending less time on Facebook and/or Twitter? I surveyed people on Google Plus about it and also did a bit of unscientific research.
The feedback I received and results from my research show that Twitter usage is indeed decreasing amongst these early Google Plus users. Facebook seems at less immediate risk, because family and non-tech friends won't be abandoning Facebook for Google Plus any time soon. Interestingly, very few people said that Google Plus hadn't impacted their usage of Twitter and Facebook. In other words, Google Plus is clearly disrupting both Twitter and Facebook.
Tired of waiting for Google - you know, the search engine company? - to add a functional search feature to its new social network Google Plus? Yep, so were we. So we did a little Googling, and found a way to add it ourselves. No, it's not a browser extension. (There is one of those, of course, but it's filled with ads.)
Instead, this method (below) uses a feature in Google Chrome which lets you add custom search engines to your browser. In just a minute, we added both Google Plus Profile search and Google Plus Posts search to Chrome.
The 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report was published today and the survey of 70,000 US consumers found Facebook to be the least satisfying of the largest social sites on the web. Only 66% of respondents said they were satisfied by Facebook, compared to market leader Wikipedia at 78%. Google, YouTube and Fox News all scored high in the survey as well. MySpace was dropped due to insufficient interest, after scoring the lowest among social sites last year. Low-scoring sites in other categories included AOL, the Huffington Post and the New York Times. Here are the numbers.
With Facebook continuing to show weak consumer satisfaction numbers, the obvious question is what this means for Google Plus. "What we do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI and Facebook is one of the lowest," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of survey partner ForeSee Results. "An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience."
A Google Plus account by Your Anon News, a part of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, was banned from that social network as having content that violated Google's community standards, according to Time magazine's Techland blog. Your Anon New's Google profile and Gmail was also cancelled.
Now, Anonymous has announced its intention of creating its own social network, AnonPlus.
Want to sync your Google Plus updates to other social networks, without having to use a browser extension? There's a new way to do this, called "Agent G," which is actually a special Google Plus user account. Once configured, you can automatically share your Google Plus updates to the social networks of your choice, just by adding "Agent G" alongside the names of the Circles or friends you're sharing a post with on Google Plus.
