When Google shipped its Search, plus Your World update earlier this month, it turned out better than expected. Google left users the ability to click back and forth between personal and global modes or opt out altogether. Google's personal search draws in the user's Google+ relationships to tailor the results. When it launched, Google took the position that other social networks were welcome to participate, they just had to make a deal.
Google does make some effort to identify content from other networks. But some SPYW features only highlight Google+ material, even when other services are more relevant. If Google favors its own product over a better result, users get the short end of the stick. Some engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have built a browser extension called Focus on the User to prove the point. But what about Google+ users? For them, Google+ results are the better result. Arguably, Google should cater to them, as users of its service.
News.me deserves credit today for some start-up agility and helpfulness. Yesterday, Twitter bought Summify, a service that crunched down links from one's Twitter feed into a need-to-know email digest, and it will be shut down. Loving users freaked out. News.me, which provides a similar service, heard those cries for help, and it has redesigned its homepage and launched new features to welcome those Summify users in.
News.me got popular with its iPad app, but it also offers an email digest with Summify-like functionality. Today it's announcing a slew of new features: Facebook support, time zone support, and control over the number of articles and sending time for the email digest. News.me also wants to know what features Summify users want.
Let's be grown up about this. Pinterest is an app for sharing lists of scrumptious-looking stuff. It's not for girls or guys, it's for people who like looking at things. The story I've heard is that it was designed for architects and designers and "then brides found it." This is why, my sources explain, it tends toward the jewelry-and-table-settings end of the spectrum.
But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you're following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google's efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it's better for users.
Google and Twitter couldn't make a deal to renew their real-time search partnership, and now Google+ is plowing ahead on its own. A new Google+ feature makes searches on the network more timely, social and shareable. Google+ users can now post updates to their streams directly from search results.
If you search for a topic or hashtag, such as "SOPA," a post box at the top promps the user to "join the discussion." Posts from this box include the note "Shared from the Google+ SOPA stream." The topic name links back to the search results page.
Facebook is ready to unleash a string of verbs into your Timeline. According to a report from AllThingsD, the Facebook Open Graph will be unleashed on the ecosystem this week bringing more "read, watch, listen" applications to the social platform. Open Graph apps that track what you eat, where and how far you run and what purchases you make could be announced as early as tomorrow.
Open Graph apps are the final installment of what Facebook announced at its f8 Developers' Conference in San Francisco last September. Open Graph apps are the coup de grace to Timeline. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time, "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."
Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.
The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.
Social "check-in" service GetGlue waited until nearly halfway through January to release its 2011 infographics. That same day, it closed a $12M round of financing led by Rho Ventures, with participation from TimeWarner Investments, RRE Ventures and Union Square Ventures. At the end of 2011, GetGlue hit two million users and logged 100 million check-ins. The site is only two years old, yet it has grown 1000% year over year. The million user mark came in April 2011. From just January to September 2011,it saw an 800% increase.
Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March, is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today's release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.
In its announcement of Explore for the Web, Foursquare says its mission is "adding an 'interesting' layer to the whole world, tailored just for you." Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of "interesting" - which is apparently a noun at Foursquare - on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add "interesting", but Foursquare's 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.
The next phase of Reddit's war against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) will begin next week when the social news community will black out its website for a period of 12 hours. In place of Reddit's user-ranked news and lively conversations will be commentary and information about SOPA, as well as video of congressional testimony about the proposed legislation.
This is just Reddit's latest strike against SOPA, a topic that has been front-and-center on the site for months now. Its community of users have turned the discussion into a type of digital activism, launching a successful boycott campaign against GoDaddy and rallying support for candidates running against pro-SOPA politicians.
Google shipped some major changes to search today. The announcement was called "Search, plus Your World." It was the inevitable launch of the integration between Google's core product, Web search, and its new identity
service, Google+. There are now two modes of search on Google, personal and global. Personal search shows users stuff from their Google+ circles, and global search is good old Google search, albeit with public Google+ posts included.
Before today, Google+ was shoved into Web search in uncomfortable ways. Public Google+ posts interfered with natural search when users were logged in. It looked like Google was going to force its social product into its users' lives. But that's not how it turned out. Today's updates put Google users' identities into their own hands.
