Google Plus got a few more fun features today in addition to workplace ones. There's a new feature called What's Hot that surfaces popular posts (don't call them "trending"), and a very cool visualization tool called Ripples that lets you watch Plus conversations flow out across the network. These are neat ways to track social activity that Facebook and Twitter don't offer.
Google Plus is very proud of its photo features, especially the instant uploads from Android phones, and today's Plus update also adds new photo editing tools called Creative Kit. It has basic editing tools as well as filters like everybody has these days.
Every good social network has a focus and a purpose. Facebook helps you keep up with friends you more or less know in real-life. Twitter is perfect for following news feeds and celebrities. LinkedIn connects you to the folks you'd rather only know professionally.
But what about the people in your real-life, honest-to-goodness neighborhood?
Enter Nextdoor, a Menlo Park, California-based startup that launched earlier today. The platform gives neighbors in specific regions the opportunity to create private websites for exchanging local information and events.
Today Klout released a new scoring model for its social media influence service. According to a blog post, this project "represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout's history."
Klout Score is based on the PeopleRank algorithm, which gathers information about how many people you influence, how much you influence them and how influential they are.
It's been over a month since Facebook launched a "Developer Release" version its new profile page, the Timeline. The new design was supposed to have been made available to all of Facebook's users in "a few weeks," but it's now almost two weeks overdue. There's been no official word from Facebook on the delay, but my guess is that it's due to mixed feedback from early users.
I have been using the Timeline since Day 1, September 22. Personally, I love the new design. But for other early users, Timeline has messed up their main reason for visiting a person's Facebook profile: to quickly scan recent updates. While Facebook is used to mixed feedback for its re-designs, Timeline is a radical change from the old profile and so Facebook needs to be confident that its mass audience will easily adjust to the new design. Unfortunately for Facebook, Timeline does appear to have some usability issues.
Findings.com is a new service that gives users a way to highlight and save quotes from digital texts and e-books, and send that information into a central, socially oriented news feed. The idea came about four years ago, when writer Steven Johnson wondered what it would be like to capture what someone was reading. Finding and capturing quotes is only one part of this service, though - its magic lies in the discovery aspects of the metadata.
"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, Google held a special press roundtable with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and SVP of Engineering for Google Plus Vic Gundotra. As he had been earlier in the day, Gundotra was relentlessly upbeat about the performance of Google Plus. Yet there continues to be a frustrating lack of specifics from Google about user metrics on its new star product.
Specifically, I asked Gundotra how many of the over 40 million users reportedly on Google Plus are active, daily users? "It's a number we're very happy with," was the best answer that I got. Rather than focus on hard user metrics, Gundotra instead steered the conversation to the engagement levels of Google Plus users and Google's plan to integrate Google Plus across all its products.
Earlier today, the Google blog officially announced that you can now replace your Blogger profile with your Google Plus profile. "Your social connections will also see your posts in their Google search results along with an indication that you've shared the post," says a Google spokesperson.
Analytics firm comScore released new data today showing that U.S. mobile social media audiences increased 37%, and more than half of social mobile audiences read a post from an organization, brand or event on their mobile device.
While the mobile browser accounted for more visits, research shows that the social networking app audience has grown five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience has grown 24% to 42.3 million users, the mobile social networking app audience shot up 126% to 42.3 million users in the past year.
Today LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Classmates, a way to tap into the power of alumni networks without calling your school's alumni office. This new tool gives you access to what your fellow alums are doing in their post-school lives, highlighting what they've accomplished since graduating, an opportunity to reconnect with alums in your field and a way to find alums who are interested in helping you.
Bill Gross is the man who made the technology behind the first keyword advertising systems online and has long been rumored to be aiming to challenge Twitter.
Today Gross launched a big, ambitious new social network called Chime.in. The service aims to offer the best of all the other social networks, plus a better experience for users and an advertising revenue split based on user interests. Unfortunately, the site is not good so far. UX is particularly important if Chime.In is going to create a thriving network with a revenue split. We talked to three different User Experience professionals who took a look at Chime.in and said it needs a drastic overhaul if it's going to be a contender. I think it's occasion to remember just how important and non-trivial the interface work on successful social networks has been.
