ReadWriteWeb

Today Google+ announced that it is now open to users ages 13+ (in all countries except for Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands). Until today, Google+ had been 18+. When Facebook began in 2004, it was open to college students only, most of whom are 18+ years old. In September 2006, Facebook became available to everyone, including users ages 13+.

A study published last year by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how parents acted on Facebook. Their study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They discovered that parents revert to adolescent behavior, which suggests that there's something inherently adolescent about social media.

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

Mark Zuckerberg's closely-watched, 2010 trip to China isn't the only reason why Facebook may be the safe bet on which of the major U.S.-based social networks will be the first to get the go-ahead to operate in China.

Access to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are all currently banned by the Chinese government. Google may be renewing expansion efforts in China, but a recent crackdown on popular Chinese microblogging sites designed to mimic Twitter suggest that if any of the big three get the permission to operate in China, the nod will go to Facebook.

Google launched a major new feature this week called Google Search Plus Your World and many people are incredibly upset about it. The feature presents search results from your contacts on Google's social network, Google+, and the things they've shared. It's clutter, critics say, it's unfair, it's a violation of a sacred contract between users and Google.

Be that as it may, the feature can also be pretty awesome. Below I've listed 5 examples of search queries that were fabulously improved by the availability of the new search results. What do they have in common? They surface timely and opinionated content, shared by people I know and trust. Search super-expert Danny Sullivan has shown with a long list of examples that some queries suffer at the hands of the new feature. I'd like to offer some counter-examples.

Jon explains what he hates about Google+. NASA creates an FAQ for the debunked 2012 apocalypse. No SOPA is a Chrome extension that helps you spot SOPA supporters in your travels around the web. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Waiting for a Google Plus invite? Google is rolling out the service in waves and you can expect it to become a ubiquitous social option in the coming months. We have been playing with the service since getting invites yesterday and there are a lot of things to like about Google's new social initiative.

Unlike Google's last big invite-only rollout of a social initiative - Google Wave - users will not be confounded on just what the heck you are supposed to do with the service when signing up for the first time. From Friendster, Friendfeed, MySpace and Facebook, users are familiar with how a social platform is theoretically supposed to look. At its core level, Plus is not that much different. Yet, there is so much more. How do you get started with Google Plus? Let's break down the nuts and bolts.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on social media, especially Facebook.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse, it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

You may have never heard of Brandon Campeaux, but more than 265,000 folks have "circled" the photographer on Google+. As of this morning, Campeaux packed his virtual bags and left Google+ claiming that the company has done nothing about death threats leveled against him on Google+.

According to Campeaux's last post, "I received 4 separate death threats through Google+. That brings the total for the month of December way over 10. I've reported each account & flagged the individual death threats. Google responded by doing nothing. Not one account suspension."

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Today Google rolled out the latest of its Google+ integration projects. This time it was YouTube, which at the same time launched a snazzy new design. The redesign is not only visually more colorful and appealing, it also promotes sharing in a big way. YouTube is enabling you to autoshare to four different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. But wait... notice anything missing there? That's right, Google+ is not included in the autosharing.

On the face of it, this makes little sense. Now I can 'like' a video on YouTube and it automatically shows up on my Facebook wall and Twitter feed. That's actually very cool. It saves me having to manually share things, yet I still control the autosharing (as I have to click the 'like' button in YouTube). Indeed this is frictionless sharing the way it should be - the user is in control of what gets shared, but it's made much easier for them. So why on earth isn't Google+ part of the autosharing?