ReadWriteWeb

Ask any power user, blogger, or journalist which PC web browser is the fastest or the most secure, and the answer will almost always be, "Google Chrome." That's because Google has done a masterful job positioning Chrome as the high-performance, secure browser.

But a bumper crop of poorly performing, quickly coded Google Plus extensions for Chrome threatens to damage the reputation Google engineers and marketers have worked so hard to establish.

Mobile application developers believe that Google's new social network Google Plus will have more impact on mobile growth and adoption than Apple's iCloud, or even iOS 5's Twitter integration. This is just one of the fascinating findings related to Google Plus revealed within the results of a new developer survey led by mobile cloud platform provider Appcelerator and analyst firm IDC. Together, the two companies had surveyed 2,012 app developers to better understand their take on current and future mobile trends.

Google continues its plodding march into the local deals space. They've just acquired The Dealmap, which aggregates local offers and displays them on a Google-powered map. This makes a natural, almost obvious addition to Google's range of local business products as it expands its mobile and social platforms. The acquisition of The Dealmap is a signal that deals will be integrated directly into Google Maps and other location searches, but the details remain to be seen. Google has quite a few location services on the table right now, and they don't yet sync up into a coherent user experience.

Many words have been expended covering user demographics on Google Plus, mostly regarding whether or not the newborn social network is dominated by men. The data visualization wizards at Bime have just posted an interactive dashboard of Google Plus data that gives us a much more granular picture.

Google Plus has been live for a month, and some have already begun to fret about its health. According to Experian Hitwise, Google Plus traffic for last week declined 3% from the week before. This might suggest that some of the initial shine has worn off, but it's certainly too early to call it a trend.

Google Plus has surpassed 10 million users, which is impressive considering the service is still limiting sign-ups. Referral traffic from the service might be down in some parts of the Web, but it's quickly become one of our top traffic sources at ReadWriteWeb.

It may have only launched a mere month ago, but Google Plus is already showing signs of promise to online marketers, especially in its ability to drive traffic to other Websites.

Google's brand new social product has a long way to go before it poses a realistic threat to Facebook's massive marketshare, but having surpassed the 20 million user mark in under a month, its growth has been impressive. By comparison, it took Facebook and Twitter a few years to reach the same milestone.

Wajam, a social search extension for the browser, has added Google Plus integration, alongside Facebook and Twitter, so that users can search their friends' posts across all three major social networks.

The plug-in displays personalized results, accompanied by faces and profiles from social networks, inside normal searches. The Wajam team says they recognizes Google Plus' appeal as "a viable alternative" to Facebook, but they also criticize it for its lack of deep search features.

Here's an interesting and under-reported story: a developer by the name of Robert Norris Hills recently created a bot that automatically adds users to Circles on Google Plus. The bot runs until it reaches the friend limit of 5,000, then removes the Circle it created and starts again, keeping those who added it back.

Why would such a bot be a problem on Google's new social network? Because, like similar "auto-follow" behavior employed by Twitter spammers in the past, many users will return follow (or in this case, return "encircle") those who follow them. And that can be used to a spammer's advantage.

There is some good news to report, however: Google throttled the bot within days of it going live. But according to Hills, that may not be enough.

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.

Companies clamoring to build a presence on Google's new social network have a few more months to wait. Business profiles are coming to Google Plus around the third quarter of this year, according to a story on VentureBeat.

While Google hasn't revealed many details about what the brand profiles will include, a Google representative told VentureBeat that users should expect "a level of analytics and measurement that you'd typically find in Google products," hinting at the inclusion of analytics in business accounts.