As Facebook has been on our front page for the past two weeks,we feel like we’ve missed out some big movements in the social media world. We certainly have some catching up to do, so does Google.
On September 20th, two days before Facebook’s f8 conference, Google+ announced it is now open to the public, and has 9 new features, which added up a total of 100 updates since it launched three months ago.
- Hangouts on your phone finally works on Android(version 2.3 or greater) powered mobile phones. We can now video chat with friends from our Circle or join other people’s conversation while on the go.
- Hangouts On Air allows us to speak to a large audience, or alternatively, view as a spectator.
- Hangouts with extras include several net new functions which enable us to do things more than chatting.
- Share screen with our friends through Screensharing
- Draw, doodle or just scribble together on Sketchpad
- Google Docs is now supported on Google+
- Named Hangouts for when we want to join or create a public a private hangout about a certain topic
- The Hangouts API is now available to developers to build new apps and games off of
- Search in Google+ lets us search for relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web
After Google+’s announcement, research estimated that the site has received about 15 million U.S visitors last week, which was 13 TIMES more traffic then the week before! Furthermore, according to a Google+ statistician Paul Allen:
“The growth rate has skyrocketed to rates we only saw during the first week of its field test”
Registered users on Google+ went up 30% in two days to an estimated 43.4 million – the biggest growth since its first beta launch three months ago.
Now let’s get back on Facebook, as today is the day Timeline is going to be rolled out to regular users (if you have signed up earlier). Be prepared!
Social Media Group’s upcoming webinar with Social Media Today!
We are proudly to present our next webinar with Social Media Today. Tom Foremski and Steven Rosenbaum will join us to discuss:
Is Curation the New Journalism?
Where journalists used to be the trusted agents for reporting on the ground and fact-checking stories before publication, every Web user is now a potential journalist. And as the deluge of user-generated information gathers strength, finding out what’s important to people in their private and working lives becomes more and more challenging. How to sort between truth, half truth and falsehood? Technical filtering can’t (yet) match human capacity to discriminate between useful content and garbage. This is the increasingly vital role of the online curator. The discussion will examine to what extent curation is becoming integral to journalism, and whether bloggers and tweeters can adequately play the the reporting role of journalists.
We’ll cover the following questions, as well as your own:
- What’s the difference between curation and journalism?
- How does factchecking work in the blogosphere?
- What are emerging best practices for online curators?
- Can the hive mind of the Internet match the formal editorial structure of a traditional news organization when it comes to producing accurate reporting and analysis of current events?
Register to the Webinar and join us on October 4th at 12pm EST/9am PST. It’s free!