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.

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What’s Hot On Google Plus

What’s Hot appears underneath new posts inside the main stream as well as in the Sparks area on the left sidebar. It’s a new way to discover content on Plus that makes a nice algorithmic complement to the right-now real-time search tool. Discovery on Plus is now nicely positioned between the ways Facebook and Twitter work.

Ripples: Watch Sharing Happen

Ripples is a sexy feature that lets you visually follow the flow of a conversation. It even incorporates some analytics. That’s much more data than other social networks give casual users about their posts. Very Google-y. Visual representations of data are catching on at the Googleplex. The Google Analytics team also recently introduced a flow visualization tool.

Creative Kit for Photos

Google touts 3.4 billion photo uploads as its favorite metric of the success of Plus. When Android users (who have turned on Google Plus) take a photo, it uploads automatically, so that’s sort of cheating. The photos are kept private until a user decides to share them on Plus, which then makes them visible instantly. If Google talked about how many photos were shared, then we’d have a real sense.

Today’s update gives Plus users some tools to spruce up their photos, which may increase sharing as users get more excited about photos. Trendy filters and Halloween gimmicks aside, Plus users can do much more with photos now.

The editing tools are desktop-only for now, but I’d put money on them coming to mobile apps soon.

What do you think of these new Google Plus features?

Discuss

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Google Plus Photo Importer ($0.99) by Dropico is a fast and easy way to get your photos from other social networks into Google+.

Google+ is the latest social networking foray from Google, and for the most part, it’s actually pretty decent. However, you have photos from all over the web, and there isn’t a very simple way to import your photos besides using Picasa. That is, until now.

Google Plus Photo Importer is currently the easiest way to get your photos from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and Photobucket and dump them into your Google+ profile.

Once you log in via your Google Account, you will be able to choose which services you want to import photos from. The available options are Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and Photobucket. While the options may be limited, it is highly likely this is where your photos are stored anyway. Perhaps in the future, the developers can look into adding more services, like SmugMug, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

When you log in to your other accounts, you’ll be able to view your albums. Just tap on the album you’d like to view and then you will be able to see all of the photos. A button at the top will allow you to Select All (or None if you change your mind), or you can manually select each photo individually. Once the images are picked, just hit the Import button at the bottom. You can choose the Google+ album you want your photos to go in, or just create a new album.

Once you go through with an import, you’ll see two figures at the bottom, which represent the service that you’re importing from and Google+. These serve as the progress bar, as they toss photos to Google+. The thumbnail will change to represent which image is currently being imported. It serves as a real-time update on what is being sent to Google.

If you have a lot of images to import, then it may take a few moments. Luckily, you can exit the app and have images be imported in the background. Even then, the app is reasonably fast when importing – importing about 100 photos will only take a few seconds, thanks to cloud-to-cloud technology.

If you’re a person that is a frequent user of Google+ and want all of your photos there with you, then this is the best tool for the job. However, you must be using at least one of the four services included, which can be a drag. Hopefully the developers can add more services in the future.

Google+ users who would like to have their photos imported to the new social network should definitely invest their dollar in this simple, yet effective, app.

• Google Plus Photo Importer
• Google+

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It’s called Google Plus, and it’s kind of a big deal. At least, that’s what we’re being told. Over, and over, and over. Yep, Google Plus is the best thing since Facebook. In fact, it’s better than Facebook. And it’s better than Twitter. In fact, Google Plus is going to be the death of them both!

Poppycock. Not only is Google Plus one of the biggest examples of style-over-substance and over-hype that the Internet has seen, it will be prove to be absolutely no threat to the dominance of Facebook and Twitter within their respective niches.

And while there are some aspects of Google Plus that are fairly innovative (and have made it attractive to early adopters), other parts of the platform have been so poorly thought out and executed that it begs belief. Other highly-celebrated features flatter to deceive, whilst being all-but-ignored by those clapping the loudest.

The Hype

Google Plus  has certainly arrived with considerable fanfare. Using the same approach that made Gmail so desirable, Google Plus  launched as invite-only, with the platform open only to a lucky few. This wasn’t entirely random — Google was careful to pre-invite many thought leaders, bloggers and pundits in the tech space (particularly in Silicon Valley), as they were always going to have a lot to say. And say it loudly.

This created an early demand that probably hasn’t been matched in internet history. The Wall Street Journal reported that in just three weeks, Google+ has had 20 million unique visitors since its launch. Even Mark Zuckerberg signed up, quickly becoming the most-followed user on the network.

Of course, visitors isn’t the same thing as users, and users isn’t the same thing as active users. So how many people have signed up for Google+? Using a surname-based analysis system, Ancestor.com founder and statistician Paul Allen pegged the membership at 10 million on July 7, a feat achieved in just 16 days. As a comparison, it took Twitter 780 days and Facebook 852 days to reach the 10 million user mark.

I mean, look at this growth — insane!

Since then, Allen estimates that Google Plus is up to 18 million to 20 million users, all achieved in about three weeks. No wonder Zuck has signed up — he’ll have nowhere else to go at this rate.

The Reality

Google Plus seems exciting now because it’s new and shiny and lots of major tech players are giving it a decent amount of attention. But it’s deceptive, and underneath very little is actually going on.

Google Plus’ 20 million signups in such a small period of time certainly seems impressive. But this is Google, a well-established search giant that already boasts over a billion users. Couple that with the must-scratch-itch that is invite-only, and you have an influx that was both predictable and self-fulfilling.

But it’s not as good as it looks. For the week ending July 19, 2011, Experian Hitwise says that Google Plus had some 1.8 million visits. That number was up 283 percent from the previous week, but relatively it’s tiny, both compared to Facebook and Twitter, but also to the number of registered profiles on Google Plus.

If Google Plus actually has 20 million signups, that means that on any given day of that week only a fraction over a quarter of a million bothered to come back. That’s about 1.3 percent. Even if you assume there are only 10 million registered users, that’s still only 2.6 percent. It’s actually less than that, as number of those visits are from brand-new users.

Either way, it’s hardly a healthy stat for long-term growth. And anecdotally I’ve seen a lot of evidence of this myself. I’ve invited dozens and dozens of my friends to Google+, and of those who have bothered to sign up (probably less than half), the vast majority – easily 90% – have registered, had a quick look round and then promptly departed, never to return. The question I’m hearing again and again is: I already have Facebook and/or Twitter, so why do I need this?

The thing is, if you register on Google+ and follow a portion of the most-followed users – people like Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose and Steve Rubel – you’ll start to believe that Google+ is the most popular thing, like, ever. Look at all those posts. More impressive, look at all those comments. Such engagement!

But it’s an illusion. These guys come with a ready-made audience, most of whom follow them pretty much anywhere. Google+ is the best thing that ever happened to them. This isn’t a criticism – they all produce first-class content. But just because they’re seeing a lot of reactions and getting a great response to their posts doesn’t mean everybody else is. In fact, virtually nobody else is. Try visiting the Google+ profiles of many of the people commenting in these guys’ posts. With a few exceptions, it’s a ghost town.

And Mark Zuckerberg racking up at least 350,000 followers isn’t proof of anything. Zuck could show up at MySpace and have 350,000 followers by the end of the day.

And let’s not forget that Google Plus had the help of Facebook and Twitter to generate all of this publicity. I don’t think we can credit this enough. A combined billion users (give or take some crossover) went completely nuts about Google Plus, with some 1.9 million tweets, 107,000 blog posts, 30,000 online news articles and 153,000 forum posts made about Google+ in the first two weeks of its launch. But this isn’t proof of success, as the vast majority of these people didn’t even have invites to the platform. It’s proof of hype, but also proof of the power of Facebook and Twitter, both of whom didn’t have the same help when they first opened their doors.

When it launched, Twitter had a little bit of help from Facebook. And Facebook had a little bit of help from MySpace, because it was so decidedly awful.

(Also, it’s worth observing that even with all this fuss, mentions of Google Plus were dwarfed by mentions of Facebook and Twitter over that same period.)

People have very short memories. When the much-derided Google Buzz opened it generated 9 million posts in the first 56 hours. It’s Google. These kinds of launches are inevitable. It doesn’t mean anything.

Where Google Got Social Right

Hangouts

Hangouts, the Google Plus live video chat, are proving very popular with a lot of users (although typically only when launched by somebody well-established and/or downright famous). Because Hangouts support multiple users, Google has one-upped Facebook’s one-on-one Skype integration, although it can’t be long until that also supports group video chat.

The User Interface

Google Plus looks great. So clean and minimalist, it totally reminds me of FriendFeed (more on that later).

Where Google Got Social Wrong (Again)

How about everywhere else?

Circles

This is being touted as Google Plus’ killer feature, as circles allow anyone to digitally organize their friends, as proposed by Paul Adam in his much-loved presentation, The Real Life Social Network. It’s so easy — simply drag and drop a friend into the circle of your choice. You can then click on any circle in your sidebar to see just content from those users. Even better, you can send your own content to any circle of your choice. Talk about targeted marketing!

The thing is: this is broken. Circles sound like a good idea on paper but in reality they don’t work. Why? Two main reasons. One, because people cannot digitally organize their friends by interest. And two, even if you could nobody talks about that same interest constantly and nothing else. In other words, a given person cannot be defined by something they like. Certainly not just that.

I’ll give you an example: Danny Sullivan. Danny is head of Search Engine Land and produces a ton of outstanding content about that space. I follow Danny on Google Plus, and filed him away in the appropriate circle. But the problem is that Danny doesn’t just talk about search engines. He also shares a lot of photos of sunsets and beaches and stuff like that. Which is fine — he can write about what he wants. Which, of course, is the crux of the issue. I could file Danny over multiple circles (search, tech, photos, sunsets, and so on) or I could keep him filed under one, but none of them are going to be accurate, because Danny Sullivan is not a robot, blindly mass-producing content about a finite number of subjects. He’s a person, and people aren’t easily pigeonholed.

This is an ongoing issue. Not only is the circle filing system likely to be inaccurate, but to make it even remotely useful you have to keep modifying and revising your circles as you start to follow new people and existing followers prove themselves to be somebody else.

Bottom line: most people won’t bother. They’ll just start to file everybody under one big circle, and put it up with it. And that’s exactly what will happen when you group too many people into one circle, especially if they’re pundits or self-promoters — the circle becomes unusable, almost instantly. A veritable nightmare of ramblings and noise.

This is the problem when you don’t have a character limit on status updates. Twitter has 140, Facebook has 420, and Google+ has no limit, at least not one that I’ve seen reached. Some of the updates are so long that they fill up multiple screens. Seriously: who wants that? Who signed up to see that? If I wanted to see every word of every article you’ve written I’d visit your blog. And cherry pick.

That’s the problem with circles as an input measure. For output, they’re even worse. Google thought they were being really smart by letting us, as individuals, decide who goes where, and then broadcasting to them accordingly. But as a system it simply does work, because of the reasons I’ve already outlined: I don’t know what you like. And you don’t know what I like. You might think you do, and Google might even be able to provide you with an algorithmic guesstimate that’s pretty accurate at this moment right now, but come tomorrow things will have changed. Come next week and next month and they’ll have changed completely. I’m not all about Twitter, and I’m not all about social media. I don’t want to see everything ever written about those things. I don’t see no ring on this finger. You don’t own me!

As you can see the way the output part of circles has been defined is backward. I shouldn’t be tagging you by your interests — you should be tagging yourself based on your own interests. You know what you like. Nobody else does. And you know that tomorrow you might not like that thing anymore. But I’ll still think your its biggest fan, blinding pushing my now-irritating content your way 24/7. Right up until you unfollow me. Hooray! Everybody wins.

If Google had set up circles so people tagged themselves, it could be a world-beater. I’d set up a Circle called Twitter, and other people would opt into it, ike a mailing list, circa 2011. Visit my profile, check out my different circles of topics, and sign up for what you want. That’s a winning content delivery system. And it will work because users choose what they want to see, rather than the broadcaster picking for them. Moreover, I could quickly see which of my circles was the most popular, and focus my efforts on that.

To me, the biggest proof that circles don’t work is the way that the Google Plus superstars like Scoble, Rubel and Sullivan are using them. Namely, they don’t. They post everything they do public. And why wouldn’t they? Who wants less people to see their content? It’s fundamentally opposed to everything we’ve ever been taught. Sure, targeted marketing certainly has its place, but only when people opt-in. Not the other way around.

And let’s remember that Facebook has had this feature forever, except over there it’s called Groups. And nobody uses it. Why would it be any different on Google?

Sparks

Are you having a laugh, Google?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a fundamentally useless, bolted-on-at-the-last-minute worthless piece of crap.

Search

The Google Plus search feature is… non-existent. You can find people and you can search via sparks (so sweet), but that’s it.

I mean: this is Google, right? Who thought leaving out a search box was a good idea?

Brand Profiles

Google Plus didn’t launch with brand profiles, promising to add them later, and announced that they only wanted real people to make profiles. Specifically: no non-humans (which I have to say I welcome). Google warned users that they’d remove any brand profiles that were set up. And on July 21, that’s exactly what they did, much to the chagrin of those involved. All except for Mashable, whose excess of 100,000 followers was saved and renamed as founder Pete Cashmore. All the other accounts — which included some major players such as Coca Cola and Good Morning America — were nuked. Talk about one rule for one.

The Scoble Effect

I’ve touched upon this a couple of times in this post but it needs more explanation. Basically, Robert Scoble ruins everything. He’s the Jack Nicklaus of social networks, because when you factor in what he’s done and doing compared to everybody else, it all falls apart. There is no comparison. He’s out there, alone, like Jonah versus the whale.

This isn’t me knocking the guy. I like him. Scoble is the early adopter personified, and gives every new major social network 100 percent of his attention. He follows bazillions of other users and seems to read everything they all post. He also generates a lot of his own content, all of which gets a bazillion comments.

So what happens is if you want Robert Scoble in your network, you are basically saying: I do not want to use this network. In fact, I want it ruined. This was true on FriendFeed, it was true on Google Buzz and it’s even truer on Google Plus. It isn’t an issue on Twitter because of the strict character limit. But when anything goes, then it’s game over. As I said, Scoble ruins everything. He even acknowledges this himself. It’s the litmus test of every new social platform.

But it’s not just Robert who breaks Google Plus. It’s all the other power users, too. Because Google Plus has relatively no controls over content, if you add more than a couple of these guys to your stream then Google Plus becomes essentially unusable. With their continuous updates and pages and pages of comments, they drown out everybody else so much that it’s both impressive and completely infuriating. Don’t worry — very soon you won’t care, because you’ll have stopped using Google+.

FriendFeed Again

To me, Google Plus is basically FriendFeed all over again. Bigger platform, and beefed-up, sure, but it’s essentially the same tech crowd (almost exactly), each of whom are showing the same enthusiasm, which delivers the same hype, which ultimately produces the same lack of returning users, simply because very few of them care about the same things to the same degree.

On that initial visit, Google Plus is just as overwhelming for most people as Friendfeed was. (And I liked FriendFeed, but it was never going to appeal to non-technical folk.) It doesn’t have the simplicity of Twitter and it doesn’t have the familiarity (and comfort) of Facebook. Instead, it sits somewhere between the two, satisfying neither one user nor the other, and ultimately appealing to neither.

Why Google Plus Is No Threat To Facebook

The people who are most active about the threat posed by Facebook, or what it is that they don’t like about the platform, are often the same people mentioned in this article. That is, early adopters, tech pundits, web entrepreneurs, journalists and high-profile bloggers. But cool as a lot of these guys are, they aren’t normal people. They aren’t the majority. They aren’t the hundreds of millions of people who use Facebook to chat with friends and family, and to play games. There’s fundamentally no reason whatsoever for these same people to leave Facebook and move over to Google Plus. Even if Google Plus copies Facebook exactly there’s no reason, as they already have what they need on Facebook.

Yep, it’s certainly true that nothing lasts forever — MySpace and AOL are the best (and increasingly cliched) examples of that. But at 750 million users plus, Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon. And Google Plus isn’t enough of a temptation to make any significant dent in that user base.

Why Google Plus Is No Threat To Twitter

People who want Twitter — that is, the majority of users, not the loudest users – want it because of what it is: a short, quick messaging service that, if one follows the right profiles (and ‘right’ is of course a very relative term – what’s right for you?) provides an easy (and powerful) way to position yourself right on the edge of the information curve.

Those same short updates also works brilliantly on most mobile phones, making Twitter very addictive.

If Google Plus has any appeal to the man in the street, it’s for vastly different reasons than why they’re using Twitter.

Google Plus As A Blogging Platform

Because there aren’t any limits to content updates, GooglePlus does work as a blogging system, and it could become a viable alternative to WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous for bloggers.

We’ve already seen some evidence of this with people like Kevin Rose and Bill Gross pointing their personal web domains directly at their Google profiles. Of course, they can reverse this any time they like, but it could be a trend of things to come, and it will be interesting to see if Google+ begins to take some share away from the established blogging platforms.

The Big Question

Google Plus could top 100 might users with little or no effort — because it’s Google. The key thing is what it takes to get the platform to the next level in social networking: The much-desired billion users. So let’s ask this question again: why would the average person leave Facebook for Google Plus, when it’s mostly the same and what’s different is a bit of a mess? Why on earth would they leave Twitter, when they’re a complete apple and oranges comparison?

Why do they have to leave at all? Surely there’s room on the block for another major social network — can’t we all just get along? So here’s what I think is the biggest question: Can people really cope with the work it takes to successfully manage three social networks?

More importantly, will they?

Because if they can’t, or won’t, it doesn’t matter what Google Plus does, what features it introduces and what fixes it makes to those already on the system. Because, relatively at first, and later in actuality, almost nobody will be paying attention.

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Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as our top social media and technology updates.

This month’s hot topic has been, without a doubt, Google+. Whether the new social service from the world’s largest search company will be a “Facebook killer” remains to be seen, but one thing’s for certain: This is one social network you don’t want to ignore.

When it comes to getting found, Google+ is fast becoming a great asset for bloggers and content producers thanks to its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools. In this post, we’ll show you a few ways to start spreading a little of that Google+ love on your WordPress-powered website.

Display Your Google+ Profile Information

Software developer John Henson from PlusDevs has developed a handy, easy to use WordPress widget that displays your Google+ profile on your blog. The setup is quick and simple: Install the plug-in and drag the widget into your sidebar. Just fill out the form and you’re done.

You can also incorporate the widget into your template with only a few lines of PHP code, giving you the flexibility to place it anywhere within your layout.

You can learn more about the widget in the official blog post or jump straight to the code on GitHub.

Unofficial Google+ user tracking site SocialStatistics.com also offers an embeddable Google+ widget. Simply add your profile to their database and grab the widget code from your page on their site.

Add the +1 Button

If you’re not already using the Google +1 button, consider taking a moment to add it to your site. This is a great way to let users save, promote and find their favorite content. The +1 button only takes a few minutes to integrate with your site and works with any Google profile. While this isn’t a Google+ specific feature, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it integrated with the service. Either way, it’s another great way of adding an additional avenue for promotion and sharing.

You can learn more about the +1 button from Google.

To add it to your WordPress site, you can either use the official +1 button code generator from Google or take a look at the myriad +1 button WordPress plug-ins available.

Use a Google+ Inspired Theme

Do you love the look of Google+’s clean, intuitive layout and unobtrusive interface? For the die-hard fan (or, hey, maybe you run a blog that’s centered around the service), there are already a few Google+ inspired WordPress themes for your perusal.

WP Plus

WP Plus is a fixed-width, 3 column Google+ inspred WordPress theme supporting custom content menus, styled sticky-posts and valid XHTML/CSS code. Clean, fast-loading and SEO optimized, WP Plus gives your blog the Google+ look and feel in just minutes.

PlusOne

Similar to WP Plus, PlusOne is another 3-column, fixed-width Google+ styled theme that supports custom WordPress menus. It’s a clean and well-designed theme, but it does take some liberties with how it translates Google+ to WordPress (so it doesn’t look quite as accurate to Google’s own design).

Reflex+

Reflex+ shares all of the features mentioned in the above two theme but it also brings in jQuery and incorporates AJAX for some tasks, such as the “read more” post navigation, helping it appear more fluid and seamless.

Want More?

Google+ is still a relatively new service locked behind an invite-only registration system. No doubt as time progresses and the service grows, there will be more options for publishers. Right now there are a couple of options if you’re a developer interested in having a go at creating your own Google+ plug-in.

If you’d like to gain access to the official Google+ API, you’ll need to sign up with Google to register interest in a Google+ developer account. Unfortunately, the API is not yet public. It’s unclear whether this will change as the service matures, but inquiring about developer access is certainly worth looking into if you want serious Google+ integration and sharing between your site and the service.

For a more portable (and presumably trimmed-down) solution, software developer Jason Striegel has put together a collection of PHP utilities for a locally-hosted Google+ API service. In its current state, the API will allow you to retrieve post and profile data and post to Google+. You can check out his code on GitHub. This is a great option to include within your own distributed code, such as WordPress plug-ins and widgets.

More About: dev, Google, Google Plus, WordPress

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“Agent G” Syncs Google+ to Other Sites

To use the service, you must first associate Agent G with your preferred social networking services, using OAuth (on Twitter and Identica) and Facebook Connect.  In testing, the service was a little buggy. It took two times to register Agent G with Twitter, three times to register with Facebook, and we’re still waiting on Identica. Maybe we weren’t being patient enough, but Agent G’s developer Saggi Malachi says the registration process should only take seconds. It did not.

Still, even with its kinks, you have to admit – this is a pretty cool idea. And as for the bugs, the source code will be released in just a few days, so crowd-sourced improvements should follow soon after, or so we hope.

How to Use Agent G

To use Agent G, do the following:

1. Sign in with Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook on this page: http://gplus.sagg.im. (See the buttons on the upper right of the page.)
2. Once connected, you will be given an authentication string. Create a Google+ post containing your authentication string and share it only with +Agent G.

    

   

3. You can now sync Google+ posts to your connected accounts by simply sharing your post with +Agent G

    

   

    

That’s it!

We should note, there’s a lag here, as well. In tests, syncs between services took several minutes, which is far from being real-time. As they say, your mileage may vary.

But if you do decide to use this service, please remember one thing: if you’re syncing to other services, be prepared to respond on those other services, too. No one likes bot spam!

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Alexis Madrigal says at The Atlantic that video chat is like cup holders in a car, essential only because of their ubiquity, but “to treat the ability to video chat in any form as tantamount to transforming communication would be reaching too far.” Michael Arrington says, in a story headlined to imply that there is a clear winner (“no contest”), that the two products don’t in fact overlap and don’t really compete. I’m going to argue otherwise; I believe Google Plus Hangouts are clearly superior.

Sponsor

Facebook’s new integration with Skype is commendable and will clearly bring joy to millions if not hundreds of millions of people. It’s available to all Facebook users today and is more a little more intuitive to use in a one-on-one chat than Google Plus is.

But you know what? Google Plus isn’t that difficult to set up for one-on-one conversation. You click to Start a Hangout, then you deselect the Public option, then you begin to enter a contact’s name and click one of the auto-complete suggestions. Then an invite is sent to that person. There is a risk that you’ll send it to the wrong email address. There is a risk that a person invited into a single-person chat won’t clearly see and understand the invitation.

I’ll bet those limitations will likely be resolved by the end of next week. Google Plus is fresh and new, it’s changing fast and its user experience team is paying a lot of attention to feedback from the probably millions of people testing the system so far. User experience is quite good throughout the rest of the site, all they have to do is smooth over a few rough edges and the Google Plus team will be able to offer its users the same functionality Facebook can and more.

By the end of this month one difference is going to separate Google Plus Hangouts and Facebook Skype: on Google you can video chat with more than one person if you want to. On Facebook you do not have that option, you will be limited to one-to-one video calling for the foreseeable future.

In the future, Google Hangout’s features like autofocus on speaking parties, video sharing and hopefully a more open API will all be relevant as well.

Of course the bigger picture battle between these two networks is another story, I’m just saying that Plus did a better job on video than Facebook.

Skype charges users $5 to $10 per month for multi-person video chat. It’s not cheap to provide. Google Plus will use it as a loss-leader and as an important feature differentiation over Facebook. It will eat the cost of high-bandwidth multiperson video chat in order to attempt to capture market share in social networking. Some observers say the Google Hangout system is architected in a way that puts much of the technical burden on the client side, or the end user’s computers. That should help.

I suspect people will like group video chats too, especially young people. That remains an open question (ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Watters asks this afternoon Do Consumers Really Want Video Chat?) but I think social networking plus video equals more video. And the option of multi-person video is better than the limitation of single-person video calls.

This is just one of many weapons that Google Plus will bring to the battle against Facebook, but I think it’s an important one. The ability to watch YouTube videos together, to do quick, free, multi-person video calls, and to collaborate with small groups – I think those are going to be important features that Facebook just won’t offer for some time.

It probably won’t be enough to put Google Plus over the top and clearly Plus is nowhere near as widespread as Facebook, nor as tested with mainstream users. But which video chat feature is better? I think it’s clearly the one the provides more than one option.

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To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, “Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?”

However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question. The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.

Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why.

As I’m browsing around Google-powered sites there’s occasionally a red notification alert that pops up and immediately grabs my attention. Soon enough I’m clicking through the various notifications and seeing what my friends have shared and who has recently begun sharing with me.

It’s a not-so-subtle tactic by Google to quickly increase the amount of time you end up spending on Google properties. It’s also an easy way to immediately add social discovery to all of Google’s products.

The notifications box is also something that Google could leverage to steal one of Facebook’s most valuable assets: developers.

Something like 30 percent or more of all Facebook users’ time on the site is from applications. While Zynga, which is reportedly filing to go public this week, has built a multi-billion dollar business on top of the platform, it has little loyalty to the company.

The primary reason is that Facebook is now taking a 30 percent cut of every game developer’s business. By contrast, Google, which brings in over $30 billion in revenue each year, could easily afford to let developers keep all the money they generate.

Add in the fact that Google also has the fastest growing mobile distribution channel of any company (Android) and you suddenly realize the power that the search giant has to woo developers.

No, Google Plus is not a “Facebook killer,” but despite the company’s numerous failed attempts at getting into social media, the new Plus product gives users no other option but to accept the fact that Google is becoming exactly that: social.

This is clearly just the start, though. Once Google Plus becomes stable and more widely used, the company will attempt to compete with Facebook where it matters most by building an entire social platform. The notifications are just one indicator of what lays ahead.

Readers, have you tried Google Plus yet — do you think it has the potential to cut into your use of Facebook?

Disclosure: I own shares of Google.

Update
Looks like I was dead on with the platform prediction … there’s now code already showing their interest in launching games within the system.

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The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It’s really easy to use and a great feature – but even if you’re communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. Below are some notes after a few hours of use.

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Above: Anil Dash on Plus. Below, Circles curation.

Big picture take-away: Google has built an attractive, intuitive, intelligent service that’s fun to use and speaks to a deep human need for contextual integrity of communication. There is not just public/private, life is more complex than that. This need, unmet by almost any other social network today, is where Google is aiming to win the hearts of users. The app the company built towards that aim is smooth and pleasing to use.

• The list, group or Circle creation interface is interesting and really easy to use. You drag peoples’ contact cards into big circles at the bottom of the page and those people are added to that group, or Circle. It’s full of fun little animations (try deleting a circle or grabbing multiple contacts) and if there is anything that will make people want to manually organize their contacts, this could be it. This is really important because as I’ve argued for several years, groups are the secret weapon of the social web. Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it. List creation on competing services has been a mixed bag. It’s undervalued at Twitter and suffocated on Facebook.
• When hovering over a username, you can see a set of Circle titles that can be checked off to add people to groups as well. It is a shame that there aren’t any recommendations for people that ought to be grouped together automatically into a common Circle. Google could do that, but perhaps like Face Recognition they worried it would set people aBuzz with eerie privacy concerns.
• The ability to toss a contact into a Circle with typing and autocomplete make it even easier to organize contacts.
• Photo sharing is really smooth and easy. I don’t have an Android phone so I haven’t been able to test the Instant Upload feature that’s reminiscent if not better than Apple’s forthcoming iCloud for photos (or Windows Mobile’s existing feature), but the desktop drag and drop uploader is very, very nice. The ability to drag things right into the share box at the top of the newsfeed is nice, too.
• Photo viewing is a little less elegant, but it’s ok.
Above: XKCD tells it like it is.
• The mobile web app is very good, though because of an error right now you can’t moderate comments as promised. That’s how high the expectations are set though!
• The mobile web app makes it easy to check in to locations, though in typical Google style (Plus being a radical departure!) there’s not a lot that happens when you check in.
• Google Plus One buttons off-site don’t flow into Plus one but they probably will in time.
• Circles aren’t public and at launch can’t be. The company says it was concerned about making public/private as clear as possible, but the curation of interesting topical Circles and then subscription to other peoples’ Circles has huge potential. Much like Twitter Lists.

• The Notification and Comments thread drop-down interface (pictured above) that now sits on top of Plus and every other Google web app, from Search to Gmail to Docs, is really nice. It’s ever-present and fully functional. It’s a great way to stay engaged with the service and was a very important addition.
• The Sparks feature, like a topic-based feed reader for keyword search results, is the least developed part of the site so far. Google Reader is so good, this can’t possibly stay so bad for too long. It’s not bad, the user experience is pretty good, but the content is sparse and there doesn’t seem to be as much quality control as there ought to be in what gets displayed. Too few, mediocre news updates on a topic aren’t exciting, but Sparks does make those updates easy to share and discuss.

The end result? So far and on balance, a very compelling experience. Google Plus invites will roll out to users over time, the first stage is being called a Field Test, in which feedback will be collected before expanding participation.

Have you had a chance to use Plus yet? What do you think of it? Can you imagine hundreds of millions of people leaving Facebook for this and sticking with it? That’s a very tall order.

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Google has just unveiled Google+, its ambitious answer to Facebook. It turns all of Google into one giant social network, thanks to a core group of social products and a new navigation bar that integrates sharing into every single Google product.

I spent much of Monday testing Google+’s features. Some first impressions:

• Design: Aesthetically, it’s all Google — minimalist with plenty of white space. Nobody is going to complain about the design, but nobody is going to cheer about it, either.
• Usability: Google+ isn’t overwhelmed by its many features. It’s easy to navigate and its icons speak for themselves. After a few minutes of exploring, I quickly got the hang of it.
• Google+ Stream: The core of Google+ is the Stream, which doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It’s a lot like Google Buzz or the Facebook News Feed.
• Google+ Circles: Circles is well-implemented. It’s far easier than creating a Twitter List or a Facebook Friend List. The drag-and-drop functionality is a welcome addition, and the cute animations that appear when you perform actions give the product personality. That doesn’t necessarily mean users will take the time to create friend groups.
• Google+ Profiles: Google+ Profiles essentially port the existing data on your Google Profile. There’s nothing particularly special about Google+ Profiles, yet. One of the nice things is that it includes a Tabs feature, where users can add content from their Google Buzz or their Google +1s. This feature already exists on Google Profiles, but we bet developers will be able to add tabs to Google Profiles in the future, customizing and personalizing profiles.
• Google+ Hangouts: Hangouts is one of the more innovative concepts of Google+, and we think it’s a cool approach to getting users to accept group video chat. The camera switching feature (it changes who’s on camera based on who’s talking) is far superior to having multiple video feeds open at the same time. That said, it will require users checking their Google+ streams every day for potential chats to join. If Google+ gains traction, Hangouts will be a killer feature.
• Google+ Sparks: Sparks may end up being Google+’s most underrated feature. The company has essentially created a recommendation engine without calling it one. It’s designed to augment Google+, and if it works as Google designed it, it will create winners and losers in the publishing world, making Google +1 buttons actually matter. Before that becomes a reality though, it needs traction and it should consider acquiring advanced content recommendation technology from a company like Trapit or my6sense.
• Google+ Photos: The photo editor is essentially Facebook photos but with a photo editor. It’s quick and well-organized, making it a welcome addition to Google+. It should take a cue from Instagram and create simple ways to make photos more “artistic” and personalized.
• Mobile: The mobile version of Google+ is really simple, which is fine for a first release. It only has two unique features: instant photo uploads and Google+ Huddle. Instant photo uploads is a cool idea, but we worry about auto-uploading all of our photos for privacy reasons. We can see some users not being happy about auto-uploads, even if the albums they’re uploaded to are private. This could potentially create a lot of “garbage.”
• Google+ Huddle: Huddle is basically a group-texting feature for the Circles you create. It makes sense as a product, but it isn’t terribly exciting. I’m going to stick with GroupMe for now.

Conclusion: Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. There’s a reason why Google calls this a “project” rather than a “product” — they don’t want people to think of this as the final product, but as a constantly-evolving entity that permeates every corner of the Google empire.

Overall, Google+ is solid. But I’m not going to call it a Facebook killer or a game-changer. The last Google product I said that about was the ill-fated Google Buzz. Perhaps that’s why Google’s rolling this out slowly via invites, the same style Gmail used to release itself to the world.

If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner. But the company will have to do even more to provide a truly compelling alternative to Facebook. At the moment, Google+ cannot compete with the king of social, but Google doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to take on Mark Zuckerberg’s giant quite yet.

Google+ Logo

This is the Google+ logo.

Google+ Icons

The Google+ icons. Starting top left and circling to the right: Circles, Hangouts, Home, Sparks, Profile, Photos.

New Google+ Navigation Bar

All Google sites will sport the new Google+ navigation bar. It includes notifications, profile information and content sharing options.

Google+ Stream

This is the Google+ Stream, where users share content and see what their friends are sharing. It is similar to the Facebook News Feed.

Google+ Circles

Google+ Circles is Google’s version of the Facebook friend list or the Twitter List. Users can select multiple friends and drag-and-drop them into groups. This makes it easier to send stuff to friends, family or the entire world.

Google+ Circles Editor

This is the Google+ Circles editor in action. Google has created unique animations for adding and removing friends through HTML5.

Google+ Sparks

Google+ Sparks is Google’s content recommendation and discovery engine. Users can search different topics and find relevant articles, videos and photos. Users can then share that content with their friends.

More About: First Impressions, Google, google buzz, Google Plus, social media

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While the plugins’ performance varies from one site to the next, the simplicity of a single click has reduced friction so much that it is practically replacing the link, something that I highlighted right after the like button first launched.

Impact Of Google +1

Google is now losing an increasing amount of information that’s being gobbled up by Facebook. The problem is so significant that the search giant is now ready to launch their own like button, +1, later today.

Right now it’s not clear how large of an impact the +1 button will actually have. In addition to being a horrible name (seriously, who came up with +1?), it’s not totally clear how it will impact search results. While it will most definitely contribute to the results at some point, there is less of an incentive for users currently.

For Facebook, the like button has essentially become the default way to share content on the social network — click a button and instantly information is shared with your friends to discover. The issue with Google is that it doesn’t have its own social distribution channel that users read on a daily basis.

I can load up my Facebook feed and instantly see everything my friends are liking around the web. Granted, I use Google numerous times throughout the day as I search for answers to questions. With my friends’ likes integrated into those results, I can quickly find out which content is the best. Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see how many users click on the “+1″ button.

Impact Of Twitter Follow

In contrast to the like and +1 button, the Twitter follow button launched yesterday is less about specific content and more about following web content creators’ Tweets. It’s more comparable to the like box, which is more targeted at the content creator looking to broadcast out to their following.

Twitter already has its own plugin, the Tweet button. The product, which was first launched last August, has gained significant traction but doesn’t appear to have impacted Facebook.

Instead, most publications have both a like and a Tweet button in an effort to increase the social distribution across both sites.

Depending on which publication you read, you’ll sometimes see more likes and other times you’ll see more Tweets. Most people actually choose between one or the other. Some prefer to share with their Facebook friends, while others prefer to share with their Twitter followers, who most likely happen to have similar interests.

Clicking Multiple Buttons?

The reality is that each product brings a different solution to the table. While the Tweet, like, and +1 buttons are all a single-click way of sharing content, the context of information on each site is completely different. While many users will now be driven to click on all the buttons, most people will click on whichever button results in the content being shared with people they want to share with.

Given that Facebook has such a large user base, there’s a good chance that it will remain the defacto social sharing button. Unfortunately we’ll have to wait and see whether or not users use the +1 button or not.

Readers, what kind of competitive impact do you see in Google and Twitter’s plugins?

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In a few months, Google plans to allow websites to add +1 buttons, which will improve a site’s search ranking when clicked. This incentive could lead to rapid integration across the web, challenging Facebook’s domination of the embeddable plugin space that has given the social network’s name and logo real estate on many of the internet’s most popular destinations.

Google users could previously see recommendations on search results sourced from the Buzz or Twitter updates of those they followed. Now a test group of users and any who manually enable the new endorsement feature can click +1 buttons on search results and AdWords ads to append their name and face to the results or ads seen by their Google, Gmail, Gtalk, Buzz and Reader contacts. Its unclear if the +1 will appear to a user’s friends in any of these channels as viral distribution.

+1′s Advantage Over the Like Button

+1 offers a lighter weight method of expressing affinity for something than the Like button, which subscribes users to updates from the button’s owner. This means Google users might be more generous with their +1s, endorsing search results or ads they think their friends would find interesting, even if they don’t want to click or open a communication channel with the entity.

Google could begin factoring a user’s previous +1s into the relevancy algorithm for serving AdWords, or even its other ad products. We’ve speculated that Facebook might introduce an Open Graph ad plugin that could allow advertisers to use the same targeting parameters from Facebook across the web. +1-powered ads could reduce the margin by which an Open Graph ad plugin could improve on existing advertising solutions.

+1 to Incentive Integration with SEO

While social media sharing buttons for Twitter, Digg, and even Google Buzz are shown on blogs and news sites, Facebook’s Like button and other social plugins have been integrated into more than 2.5 million websites, including ecommerce, brand, and web service sites. Facebook released an analytics tool for these integrations earlier this month, convincing more holdouts.

This presence has helped Facebook continue to grow its user base, as site visitors who want the benefits of these plugins must sign up for accounts. The forthcoming +1 for websites, would raise a site’s PageRank with every click, creating a very strong SEO incentive for integration. Facebook might no longer be the only web service with a strong cross-web presence.

While Facebook has developed a significant lead in plugin integrations and social context ads, +1 could level the playing field, and serve as a basis for more social networking features from Google.

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The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well. Sposato may be the only entrepreneur to have sold not one but two startups to Google – having founded Phatbits, a service that was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Gadgets. These are heavy hitting tech leaders and the service should be very interesting.

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Google’s response. Google is now telling Liz Gannes at the technology blog All Things D that there is no product being developed. That’s a real shame, if that’s the truth of the matter.

Gannes writes:

When a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at SXSW. But such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it.

Google’s Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me directly today that he “didn’t know what [the story] was talking about.”

A trusted source with credible information, among several conversations I’ve had, lead me to draw the conclusions I did. I tried to frame them with some cautious caveats, but now Gannes is being told something different. To be honest, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been told that a story I broke “was not based in fact” only to see something pretty darned close get confirmed later. I guess we’ll see about this one.

And now to return to our previously posted report. These details may in fact be a picture of what Google is going to do. They may instead be simply what Google ought to do. Take your pick, we’ll know in time, I suppose.

A Matter of Personas

With Circles, I believe that Google will attempt to accomplish something critics from the blogosphere, academia, SXSW 2010 keynoter danah boyd, privacy watchdogs and others have all called on the social networking world to do: to allow our online communication to respect the same boundaries that our offline social lives do.

School and work, friends and family, the sacred and the profane; we’ve always been able to communicate different things to different people in different circumstances. Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks have collapsed all those contexts into one big bucket. We speak to our “friends” all at once, no matter what we might want to say to one group of people or another. And thus we often feel less comfortable than we might saying anything at all.

This fundamental discomfort has been, many people argue, a limiting factor in the growth, reach and depth of online social interactions. If that problem could be solved, there are big new ways that the online world could grow and evolve. This has been a more sophisticated understanding of privacy, not just as a public/private dichotomy but as a matter of contextual integrity of communication, that we and others have been calling on Facebook to adopt for almost two years.

The development of Circles is likely heavily influenced by the work of ex-Google social technology researcher Paul Adams. Adams has written a book called Social Circles, which will be released this Summer and he published a widely read slide deck about what is wrong with social networking: specifically the lack of respect for context and personas. (The Real Life Social Network) Adams worked on User Experience at Google for four years, but just months after publishing his influencial presentation he left Google for Facebook.

Courting Developers

Given who is working on it, I expect that Google Circles will be as developer friendly as other Google social products, but with a much greater emphasis on design and usability.

Messina and Sposato both have strong backgrounds in working with developers and APIs. Messina was trained as a visual designer and created the full page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox, then went on to become a leader in the open web community. His work has included co-creating the international unconference phenomenon called Barcamp, helping build OpenID federated identity system, leading the Activity Streams movement for an interoperable social network user activity data system and initiating the use of #hashtags on Twitter. When he joined Google in January 2010, we wrote extensively about his life and career.

Right: Messina posted this photo on Foursquare today of posters promoting Google’s hacker event at SXSW.

It is nearly inconceivable that Messina would be involved and the effort wouldn’t be a standards-based platform play. If Circles is unveiled at SXSW, the timing couldn’t be better from a developer relations perspective. Google can position itself as going exactly the opposite direction Twitter is. Twitter saw its biggest outpouring of criticism yet when it told developers on Friday that they should not build any more basic interfaces, clients, for using Twitter. It remains to be seen how that will play out, but if a major social network wanted to try to lure developers to build on their platform, this could be a good time to start talking about it.

Google Tries Again

Google has launched many different social efforts over the years but has remained far behind Facebook and Twitter in its efforts. Social networking is an important technology for Google to find success with as it’s a key way that people spend time online and that targeted advertisements are delivered to those people.

Google Buzz felt overbearing and bolted on. It also got privacy terribly, terribly wrong. Google Wave was more confusing than collaborative. Google’s Open Social interoperable widget platform was hugely hyped as a distributed Facebook killer, but it now primarily focused on enterprise social networks.

Reports emerged last June that Google has been working on a secret social project called Google Me.

In December a screenshot was leaked to TechCrunch showing a new toolbar item on Google.com called “Loop.” (Loop seems similar to Circles – I think Circles is better.) I believe that Circles will be a toolbar level service as well.

It’s hard to think of a stronger angle to take than support for contextual integrity of communication and conversation, of personas in social networking.

Google has tried and failed in many other (though not all) social efforts. Bringing some of the best thinking and the best innovators in the world to a new effort to tackle one of the world’s biggest problems is very ambitious.

Presuming that the things we’re hearing are true (I believe they are), then we’ll follow up with in-depth coverage of Google Circles once it’s launched. That may be tonight, it may be as far in the future as the Google IO developer conference in two months – but I believe we are going to see at least some parts of it today. More clear than the timing is that this is definitely happening: Google is putting some of its most innovative social thinkers behind a major product called Circles and focused on personas.

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Google‘s location-sharing app, Latitude, has just added the ability to check in at a specific business or other location. In the past, users simply pinpointed their location on a map.

The difference seems minute, but letting users check in at a “real place” is an important part of Google’s overall strategy.

As Google Latitude engineer Joe LaPenna blogs, “Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I’m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby.”

And real locations mean real advertising opportunities. After all, knowing your intersection or latitude and longitude isn’t nearly as much an opportunity for behavioral targeting as knowing that you’re at a coin-op carwash or that you frequently eat at Indian restaurants.

Here’s the app in action on an Android phone:

Latitude is adding a few key components to its checkin offering, too. Users can choose to get a mobile notification to check in when they arrive at a location. They can also choose to let the app automatically check them in at designated spots. Checkouts — a rather new concept in the location game — are also automated.

Here’s a demo of how checkins will work:

Checkin apps have been of particular interest to Google for some time. In the company’s most recent location offering, Hotpot, a Yelp competitor, checkins were conspicuously absent.

Although it’s likely that the extra, automated features were worth the wait, we wonder how much ground Google has lost to companies like Facebook (its Places product is taking off) and Fousquare, both of which already have compelling checkin apps on the market and strong user bases.

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Why is Google working on mobile location tracking and sharing? It’s all about search and relevance. “Our idea is to organize the world’s information and part of that is location,” Latitude’s Ken Norton told us. “Location is a vector against which all factors and metrics will be considered.”

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New Ways to Check In on Latitude

Latitude users to date have shared their literal location on a map with a select group of family and friends. Just because friends knew where on a map you were, though, doesn’t mean they knew what “place” you were at. (Coffee shop or hospital emergency room?)

All latitude users will now be able to check-in with their phones to specific Google Places locations. When Latitude for the iPhone launched in December, I called it a big disappointment. These new developments are an improvement for sure.

Will Latitude allow users to publish check-ins out to other services like Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook? “We are currently looking at ways to publish to other services,” Google’s Norton says. “It’s an incremental feature to adress the needs of Latitude users.” The ability to read check-ins from other services, like Gowalla now allows, seems even further out in the future. Despite what they say about interoperability, most of these location services would still like to be the only game in town.

Two new methods that other location services don’t offer yet: Android Latitude users can now opt-in to receive a push notification when they have stopped moving for a period of time at a place that Google recognizes. “We see you’re hanging out at Hot Pot City on 2nd avenue,” the notification might say. “Would you like to check in there?” Hallelujah!

The next method beyond clicking to check-in as is standard across location apps is a new “geofencing” method. Latitude users on Android can designate certain places they visit frequently and be checked-in there automatically whenever their phone detects that they’ve returned to that spot.

Both of these are very smart features that will greatly reduce the overhead on checking in and thus greatly increase the frequency with which people declare their location to the web. That’s great news.

Norton says that his team is working hard to get the iPhone app for Latitude caught up with Android. I hope these automated check-ins will come to the iPhone app soon. Eventually all location services will likely offer features exactly like these.

Geo-organized Web Content?

Will Google make my dreams come true and help surface news and web content relevant to the Places I visit, automatically? Norton said that Latitude and Google Places would do some of that, but said that Google Goggles was more focused on that kind of search.

I check-in at the park down the street, and there’s a beautiful PDF walking tour of the trees in that park available online, but it’s on page 3 of Google search results. It ought to be shown to me much more accessibly.

“Rather than building what users ask for, ” Norton says, “ask what the problems are that you could solve. With Latitude, I want my spouse to know where I am. I don’t think people would have known to ask for that.”

That makes sense, but the mark of truly great innovation is creating things that people don’t even know they want yet. I’m worried that Latitude, for all its innovation, is going to remain mundane in the long-term. Maybe even get into mobile coupons. Boring!

Give me something I don’t even know I want yet, Google. But first, give me automatic check-ins on iPhone and read/write interoperability with diverse location services. Those sound great.

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Mobile privacy controls have been a focus of updates to many of Facebook’s mobile sites and apps over the past six months. Access to controls over content sharing, communication, and basic directory information were added to m.facebook.com in August. iPhone users gained the ability to restrict status updates to certain people on a post by post basis, and in November received quick links to Account and Privacy settings on the full site. The changes shows that Facebook recognizes how access to privacy controls is crucial to keeping its 200 million users sharing through their mobile devices.

Last month, Facebook launched single-sign on for mobile applications, allowing apps to piggyback on the a user’s login to Facebook through their native Facebook app such as Facebook for iPhone. Since apps no longer have to explicitly require users to enter their credentials to let them access their data, mobile application privacy controls became necessary to control that access. The turnaround time of just over a month for implementing these controls is admirable.

Once access to the controls has been rolled out to a user, they can navigate to them by visiting m.facebook.com/privacy or by clicking “Settings” at the bottom of their mobile page, then “Privacy Settings (change)”. There users will see an Applications and Websites section they can click through to make changes.

First, users see the Applications You Use section, where they can view a list of allowed apps listed in order of which was the last to access their data. Clicking through to an app reveals options to remove the app, rescind optional permissions, and what data was last accessed. These controls make it easy to tell if a user has given an app access or not, and stop apps which are abusing this access, such as those posting to a user’s wall or sending emails too frequently.

Info Accessible lets users allow or deny access to each category of their profile data and content to apps their friends are using. Many users don’t realize that even if they don’t use any third-party apps or websites, these parties may be accessing their data through friends who are less cautious. The addition of these controls to the mobile interface could increase awareness.

Lastly, the Game and Application Activity section lets users select who can see that they’ve installed an app or made a request for friends to join or help them in a game. As more Facebook Platform social games move onto mobile devices, the ability to switch to playing privately through the same interface will become more important.

The mobile optimized privacy controls make it quicker and easier to make changes that using a mobile browser to visit the slow-loading full site. It’s worth noting that Facebook consistently uses images of Apple’s iPhone when blogging about updates to the m.facebook.com interface — which is available on all mobile handset browsers. The lack of images depicting Android handsets lends a little more weight to the idea that Facebook may be purposefully pushing the iPhone over Google-powered phones. This could be to suppress the search giant’s mobile presence as Google plans the launch of a competing social product which may be deeply integrated with the Android platform.

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The latest version of the Facebook for Android mobile application reduces the functionality gap between Google’s younger OS and the iOS by adding new features Places and Groups. However, some core features such as Chat and push notifications are still missing, leading many Android users to feel neglected or ignored by the app’s development team.

The Facebook for Android v1.4 follows the August v1.3 update which added the ability to respond to friend requests and Event invites, video playback, a redesigned home page, and a photo carousel which is unique to Android.

The most recent release might have come sooner, but Facebook said at its mobile event that Google bought the company it was outsourcing development of the app to at the last minute. Single sign-on, allowing other Facebook-integrated Android apps to piggyback on a user’s login to the Facebook for Android app, was also announced at the mobile event. However, neither Facebook Deals nor the new Messages product appear to be supported.

The features added in v1.4 run smoothly. Groups, accessible through a home page icon, lets users see a list of their Groups with counters denoting unread posts. Users can read posts, share to a Group’s feed, and see a Group’s members.

Places can only be accessed from its home page icon, and there is no option to check in through the news feed. Users can view check-ins of friends, choose a nearby Place to check in to, and tag friends, similar to the first Facebook for iPhone release with Places.

However, v1.4 doesn’t include second generation Places functionalities such as being able to add a photo to a check-in, or tag additional friends after the check-in has been made, which are available in the latest Facebook for iPhone 3.3.1.

Users now see notifications about comments and updates which link to that activity within the app. High resolution photo uploads are also supported in this release.

Along with the lack of Facebook Deals, users must still use external apps such as Go!Chat to instant message with their Facebook friends. This is a major gripe amongst Android users, with hundreds pleading for Chat on the Facebook for Android Page where the updates to the app are announced. The other significant deficiency is the lack of push notifications, meaning users must constantly open the app to check for new notifications.

Facebook was slow to begin developing an app for the Android OS. The company may still be throttling feature releases to handicap Google, which it has clashed with recently over data portability, and could be competing with when Google’s social product is eventually released. In the meantime, Facebook for Android users are still a step behind iPhone users, but should take comfort in knowing they’re stil better off than those with Blackberry or Palm devices.

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As this year begins to wrap up and businesses start preparing big plans for 2011, we expect social media and technology innovations to be a bigger part of small business digital budgets. To spark a bit of creativity and help get that process rolling, we’ve gathered 35 of our most useful small business posts from the past few months to make sure businesses are in the digital know.

Each week we put together a roundup of essential social media resources that you may have missed that week — you can check those out here. But this week we decided to take it a step further and provide you with another megalist of just our top small business resources from the past few months, including social media, tech, marketing & advertising, dev & design and mobile articles written especially for our small business crowd.

Of course, if you’re still hungry for more business resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. Happy reading!

Social Media

• 5 Big Social Media Questions From Small Business Owners
  From group buying and location-based marketing to SEO and blogging, here are five fresh questions that small business owners have on their minds.
• How SMBs Can Start Using Facebook Places Now
  Here are a few pointers for how SMBs can leverage Facebook Places and other marketing tools starting today.
• Should You Search Social Media Sites for Job Candidate Information?
  Here are some pointers from recruiting and legal experts about when it is and is not appropriate to search social sites for job candidates.
• 5 New Ways Small Business Can Offer Location-Based Deals
  Small businesses can leverage verified checkins, barcode scanning, group buying initiatives, activity-based rewards, and opt-in lists for location-based deals.
• HOW TO: Respond When Social Media Attacks Your Brand
  Here are three examples of companies that received negative attention on social media and how you can learn from their mistakes or successes.
• 12 Clever Social Media-Friendly Business Cards
  While virtual business cards are becoming a viable alternative to paper cards, there is still a huge demand for traditional business cards. Here are 12 biz cards that integrate social media.
• HOW TO: Use Social Media for Lead Generation
  Being that social media is a great place to attract new customers, we put together a quick guide on how to use social media for lead generation.
• Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Take Social Media for Granted
  When done right, social media can be a valuable source for customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction. Here a few reasons to help drive the value home.

Tech

• Are Groupon Stores and Do-It-Yourself Deals Worth the Risk?
  Groupon is rolling out a self-serve product called Groupon Stores that allows merchants to set up virtual storefronts and manage their own deals through the group buying site.
• How Online Private Sales Work and How Businesses Can Get Involved
  A look at the ins and outs of online private sales and how businesses can benefit from getting involved.
• 12 Video Tutorials for Improving Product Photos
  If your company sells items online, product photographs can be a key factor in how well they sell. These 12 tutorials will help improve your presentation.
• HOW TO: Connect With Other Entrepreneurs Online
  The best way to learn how to run a business is to run a business. But the second-best way is to ask someone else who runs a business. Check out these sites for advice.
• 5 Tips for Utilizing Skype for Business
  We could write a book-length guide on using Skype, but here are just five of our favorite tips for getting the most out of Skype for small business.
• HOW TO: Run Your Business Online With $10 and a Google Account
  Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to a customizable and scalable business infrastructure that lives where your employees do: in the cloud.

Marketing & Advertising

• HOW TO: Run Location-Based Google Ads
  Learn how to use Google Boost, a new location-based ad product for local businesses.
• HOW TO: Earn Some Inexpensive Online Exposure for Your Small Business
  Looking for inexpensive PR? We spoke to some PR pros to find out how to tap into the online media and get your biz a little exposure without breaking the bank.
• HOW TO: Manage Your Presence on Google Maps
  Many of the features that you might normally associate with Yelp are actually included in what Google calls Place Pages. Learn how to manage your Google Maps presence.
• 4 Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
  Search rank can be a powerful way to drive readers and customers to your site. Check out this advice on how to make your business blog more Google-friendly.
• 15 Excellent Corporate Blogs to Learn From
  Although the act of blogging can be quite simple, forethought and planning must first go into the creation of a corporate blog in order to keep the processes running smoothly.
• 10 Tips for Corporate Blogging
  There is a laundry list of issues that need to be addressed when it comes to improving corporate blogs, but here we’ve narrowed it down to 10 tips that companies should work on.

Dev & Design

• 10 Free Drupal Themes for Small Business
  Drupal, an open source CMS, is a wonderful option for businesses needing a powerful website without the typical costs of having one made from scratch. Check out these free themes.
• 5 Beautiful Tumblr Themes for Small Businesses
  There are hundreds of great themes that you can use with Tumblr to give your blog its own unique look. Here are five clean and professional faves for small business users.
• 10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses
  Need a professional-looking WordPress theme to complement your business website or blog? Here are 10 great free options.
• HOW TO: Hire a Designer or Developer
  Here are four tips that will help you hire the best tech creatives and ensure you’re getting what you paid for.
• HOW TO: Communicate Needs & Expectations to Web Designers
  Hiring a designer is simple. But what you get from that designer depends on how well you communicate what you want, need, and expect. That part’s not so easy.
• HOW TO: Avoid Being a Disaster Client
  We spoke with a few designers to find out about their worst client experiences and what could be learned from them.
• 5 Lightweight CMS Alternatives for Small Businesses
  These five lightweight alternatives might not have as many options and features as a traditional CMS, but they are built with an emphasis on making web pages easy to create and update.
• 5 Small Biz Web Design Trends to Watch
  Here are five current design trends that most small businesses can tap into for great effect.

Mobile

• 13 Branded Mobile Apps That Got It Right
  Branded apps can be a great way to market your company while providing utility to users. Take a lesson from these 13 mobile marketing success stories.
• 9 iPhone Apps for Managing the Recruiting Process
  Instead of creating new processes or downloading a bunch of new apps, here are some iPhone apps you might already have that can help you manage the recruiting process.
• HOW TO: Build an App for Your Small Business
  Small to medium-sized businesses looking to build a Facebook, mobile or web app can choose to employ online DIY tools, freelancers, agencies or in-house devs. Learn more about the options.
• HOW TO: Accept Credit Card Payments on Mobile Devices
  Learn how to set up mobile payments with Square, Intuit GoPayment and Verifone’s PAYware Mobile.
• Why Small Businesses Should Care About Mobile Payments
  Studies show that mobile transactions are increasing exponentially. Will your business be ready when this trend hits the mainstream?
• HOW TO: Use QR Codes for Small Business Marketing
  If you’re unfamiliar with the business potential of QR codes, use this post as a crash course in how to get started.
• 5 Useful iPhone Apps for Business Networking
  Five useful iPhone apps that will help you become a better business networker.

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Image courtesy of Flickr, windsordi

More About: advertising, business, conversational marketing summit, online advertising, online marketing, small business, social media marketing

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Facebook is currently rolling out access to its new Places feature to the Facebook for iPhone app and touch.facebook.com. Those with access can check in to nearby locations, view a stream of check-ins by friends, and add new Places for anyone to be able to check-in to. Those whose accounts haven’t been granted access can still use the iPhone app to view check-ins of friends. Everyone can currently see check-ins from friends in their news feeds, and edit their Places privacy settings.

Places appears as a button in the middle of the iPhone home screen and a tab on the touch.facebook.com home screen. Upon first using Places, users are prompted to allow it to use their current location. The Places home screen shows your latest check-in at the top, followed by a list of friends who’ve checked-in nearby, then a list of the most recent check-ins by friend regardless of location.

Clicking any of these entries brings up that location’s Places page. Here you’ll see a map of where the Place is, anyone who is “here now” (have recently check-in in there), total check-ins, and recent activity — a list of feed stories generated by check-ins to that place. These feed stories show who checked in there, anyone they tagged as also being present, a description by the check-in author if provided, and any likes or comments on the story. Users can also flag Places as having incorrect info, being abusive (such a someone creating a Place at your Mom’s house), being a business which has permanently closed, or being a duplicate of another Place. On Facebook.com, users can click through check-ins they see on their news feed to view a Place’s page.

Clicking “Check In” at the top of the Places home screen, or by clicking the upside down teardrop Places icon next to the status update publisher brings up a list of suggested nearby Places. Selecting one brings up the check-in publisher page, where a user can fill out the optional “What are you doing?” field, tag friends who are also present, and check in, as well as see people “Here Now”, and view previous check-ins to that Place. Checking in results in a post to your wall, the wall of anyone tagged, feeds of your friends, the wall of the Place, and you appear in the “Here Now” list to anyone, friend or otherwise, who checks in to the same Place. Check-ins peg you as being “Here Now” for 3-4 hours. There is currently no limit to how frequently you can check in to different Places, and you can check in anywhere within a half mile of your GPS-sourced location.

If you don’t see the Place you want to check in to, you can hit the “Add” or + sign to enter a new Place which will be available to the public for check-ins. You enter the new Place’s name, an optional description of it, and its location is set as your current location. Facebook shows users a warning when adding a Place to ensure they know that this data is public. Maps for Places are powered by Bing, so clicking a map on touch.facebook.com will bring up a separate mobile browser window with a Bing map. However, clicking a map on the iPhone app brings up Google’s in-Facebook app map interface with an option to open the Google Maps iPhone app.

Businesses can claim a Place by having an official representative go to the Places page and click “Is this your business?” This gives that representative admin access to the Place, which gains Page-like functionality such as the ability to list business information and post updates to those that Like the Places page, but not those who only check in. A Place can also then be merged with an official Page. This essentially migrates your existing Likes, photos, and wall posts from your Page to the Place page, and shows your Page’s tabs as a list of icons down the left hand column.

Privacy settings for Places data must be set on the fixed web version of Facebook.com. Places activity posted to your profile defaults to only being visible to friends. Other users can check you in at Places by default, but if you don’t have Places access you’ll receive permission emails asking you to allow friend check-ins until you click “Allow” in an email or enable them in your privacy settings. If you have Places access, you’ll receive a notification upon being checked in asking you to “Allow check-ins”, or “Not Now” – which means you’ll be asked each time you’re checked in.

Facebook has allowed sites using Connect and third-party applications to access your Places data and that of your friends if they acquire permission from you. Unless you have deactivated the Facebook Platform or unchecked all “info available through my friends” boxes in Application Settings, Places data will default to be available to apps of friends.

“Here Now” presents the biggest privacy concern, as currently you can only enable or disable being visible to everyone who checks in to the same Place as you. There is no granular control for this option. “Here Now” defaults to enabled if you have any of your existing privacy settings for other content set to “Everyone”, even something as benign as your favorite quotation or birthday. Since there seems to be no limit on frequency of check-ins, and you only need to be with a half mile of a Place to check in, someone could check-in all over town as a way of locating someone else who isn’t their friend.

Overall, Places presents a seamless way to share your location, and the ability to tag friends is an innovative differentiation from other location-based apps. Currently there is no way to view a stream of only check-ins by friends on Facebook.com. This ability to be at home and see that three friends are at a bar around the corner is key to getting people out of the house and using the app. If Facebook adds this, as well as granular privacy controls for “Here Now”, changes more data to be opt-in than opt-out, and lets users control Places privacy settings through the mobile interfaces, they may have found their new killer app.

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Wireless neutrality is important to Facebook because it wants an even playing field on which to send data to its 150 million mobile users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed a letter to the FCC last year urging them to uphold net neutrality, joining Twitter CEO Evan Williams, Digg founder Kevin Rose — and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Preserving an open Internet that is accessible to innovators — regardless of their size or wealth — will promote a vibrant and competitive marketplace where consumers have ultimate control over the content and services delivered through their Internet connections” said Noyes, Head of Public Policy Communications, who Facebook hired last October. The company likely worries that some sort of wireless deal between Verizon and Google could lead to its data being throttled or access getting a lot more expensive. The proposal presented to the FCC would legitimize such as deal.

Google’s Android handset operating system has taken hold with all the major carriers since 2007 when the company spoke out regarding the need for a neutral wireless network. Google’s stronger relationships with the carriers, brought about by the OS and handsets, could help it secure accelerated speeds for access to its web services. This could lead to a slowdown of Facebook mobile data, a scary prospect considering their upcoming duel with Google’s potential competitor to Facebook, Google Me.

While the proposal calls for the first “enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices” for the existing broadband internet, it also excuses a potential parallel, premium channel of the internet from following the same rules. “Our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services…[that] might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options.” Carriers could prioritize innovation on this more monetizable channel, stifling improvements of the open internet which Facebook would likely continue to operate on.

The FCC is currently developing a report on how to improve internet access that will integrate “broad public input” said Chairman Julius Genachowski. Blogs and policy watchdogs have fervently denounced the proposal (see Techmeme for the full discussion) meaning if public opinion continues in this direction, Google and Verizon might not get their way.

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Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an “email-killer” (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a “product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.” That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people. Still, with a rumored 100 Google engineers working on Wave to date, a call from Google for more engineering collaboration less than a month ago, and such high hopes – it’s a bit of a shock to see it come to an end.

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When Wave launched, respected enterprise analyst Stephen O’Grady wrote a long post answering questions about the product. ” If Google Wave is successful,” he wrote, “it will mean that Google will be the vendor defining the next generation experience for millions, potentially tens of millions of users, worldwide. Next to that prospect, the threat of Google Apps is but a trifle.”

That adoption inside of companies never took off, though. Gartner may have foreshadowed some reasons why in a June, 2009 research note. A team of analysts there argued that Wave would be challenged by its “large aggregation of features, which can daunt users,” “dependence on the latest Web browser technologies,” and “likely overlap with multiple areas in an enterprise’s IT environment.”

“Wave shows that workplace offerings will eventually have to combine Internet standards and a decentralized, federated architecture,” that note continues. “Whether or not Wave ultimately succeeds, the Web will win.”

Does it still feel that way? Was Wave just too far ahead of its time?

Was it perhaps too confusing? The hour and a half long demo video Google released probably didn’t help. Gina Trapani, who cut that video up into bite sized highlights, later went on to write a collaborative manual all about using Wave.

Proponents of the service say it wasn’t that complicated and was remarkably powerful. Maybe this failure should be chalked up as another example of how Google “doesn’t get social” in terms of user experience or successful evangelism. After an immediate explosion of hype, it never felt like Google was really trying very hard with Wave.

At ReadWriteWeb, we found that Wave was very useful as a live blogging tool. So we’re sad to see it potentially go.

It will take time to figure out exactly what happened, but it’s a little shocking to hear that it’s over. It had so much potential. Clearly potential is something that’s easier to summon than it is to execute on. I hope this vision succeeds, someday.

Update: CNet’s Ina Fried caught up with Google CEO Eric Schmidt today and got some interesting quotes from him on the demise of Wave.

Discuss

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Praise the lord and pass the Android! Facebook’s once features-bereft mobile application for the #2 mobile operating system has just been updated, and it’s worlds better than the original.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downloaded the Facebook for Android app for his personal use last week, we speculated that a few changes might be in the works for what we dubbed the “redheaded stepchild” of Facebook’s mobile offerings. We couldn’t have imagined such a quick turnaround, however; clearly, this update has been quite some time in development.

If the update isn’t showing up in your notifications bar, just search for “Facebook” in the Android Gallery and reinstall the official app.

The home screen now shows messages, notifications and friend requests separately. On the bottom of the home screen, you can see a swipe-to-scroll slideshow of your friends’ recent picture uploads.

Notifications, which comprised the greatest pain point for users we polled last week, now appear in a slide-up bar along the bottom of the screen, similar to the Android OS’s slide-down bar for notifications at the top of the screen. While the Notifications bar doesn’t seem to be working quite smoothly with the rest of the app yet (it keeps launching Facebook’s mobile touch site), we hope an upcoming software update will address this issue soon.

And we’re grateful and slightly ecstatic to report that you no longer have to navigate out of the app to Facebook’s mobile site to do any normal Facebook actions, such as approve a friend request, view a video, RSVP to an event or respond to a message. You’ll use your device’s browser when you click through to shared links, but getting to those links is much easier now. You click through to a screen showing your friend’s post with the link in question, then you tap on the link itself to be redirected. It’s a much better interface than the app’s previous iteration.

Also, “likes,” Facebook search and mobile photo uploads are now as easy as a single touchscreen-tap in most cases, and the overall navigation and interface have gained a few new touches that are subtle but elegant and welcome.

We still aren’t able to use Facebook Chat from our Android phone (iPhone users have had this feature for some time).

These upgrades are the first significant attention Facebook has paid to its Android app since its launch last fall. All things considered, we’re very happy with the improvements. Facebook for Android has become a pleasure to use rather than the out-and-out hassle it was before.

We’re sure there are still improvements to be made — Facebook Chat is one feature that comes to mind immediately. And we’d like the home screen to rotate to a landscape orientation when the phone is rotated, too.

Download the app for yourself, and let us know in the comments what you love, what you hate, and what you think could use improvement.

More About: android, facebook, Google, Mobile 2.0, trending

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With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better. Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers.

In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.

We look forward to working with the talented Metaweb team. We’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months. In the meantime, if you’re interested to learn more about Metaweb’s technology, we encourage you to check out a helpful video they’ve posted on their blog.

Posted by Jack Menzel, Director of Product Management

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In a blog last week Microsoft announced the changes to Docs.com were made in response to user feedback since the service’s launch in April. Apparently one of the most requested changes came from Page administrators eager to have the ability to post a document on Facebook.

Under the changes, Facebook Page admins may now: Author a document as your Facebook Page, post a document to the Page, add a Docs tab to your Page and all admins may share/manage documents created for the Page.

A slideshow with more detailed information is available here.

As we reported previously, Docs was unveiled as one of Facebook’s Instant Personalization sites at its f8 developer conference in April.

At the time, Docs.com was in beta testing, although the idea was eventually for Facebook users to use Docs.com while on Facebook. These new changes seem to further that idea, allowing more ways for Docs.com users to use the service while on Facebook.

As a strategic investor in Facebook, Microsoft is hoping to use product partnerships like this to breathe more life into its aging line of productivity software, using Facebook social features to make collaboration easier, even as rivals like Google try to do the same. We’ve heard that more Facebook integration may be coming from Microsoft this year.

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