Google Plus + Google Apps
Google Plus is now available with Google Apps, adds sharing history with Google+ Ripples; http://eicker.at/GoogleAppsPlus
Google Plus is now available with Google Apps, adds sharing history with Google+ Ripples; http://eicker.at/GoogleAppsPlus
Google Plus is joined by millions of new users since its opening, according to Paul Allen; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusGrowth
Allen: “My team just completed a new round of counting Google+ users by surname. And I have updated my model. Our sampling of 400 uncommon surnames in the U.S. also reflects usage in many other countries, since the list of 400 includes names that are popular in India, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and many other countries. … On September 9, our model showed 28.7 million users – This morning, our model shows 37.8 million users, with most of the growth coming in the last 2 days – By adding a fudge factor (see below) to account for private user profiles and for non-Roman surnames (both of which are totally overlooked by our surname counting model), my current estimate is 43.4 million users … My earlier model… which proved to be very accurate in the first 2-3 weeks, did not address either private profiles or non-Roman alphabet. According to FindPeopleOnPlus.com, there are substantial numbers of users from countries like Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, and many other countries, which my surname counting approach does not include. So I have decided to add a 5% privacy fudge factor and a 10% non-Roman alphabet fudge factor in my Google+ model. I’ll need to develop a way to actually calculate those percentages somehow, rather than just guess on them.”
SEL: “A Google+ post by Paul Allen, founder of ancestry.com and a self-proclaimed ‘unofficial Google+ statistician’, shows significant growth of Google’s social network since opening to the public. These growth rates were only first seen during the first few weeks of field testing when the user numbers were very low. In terms of the current growth spurt Allen states: ‘it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding – 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already.’ … So what does this mean? Google+ may be cementing themselves as a credible social network, but the mass exodus from Facebook just isn’t happening.”
eWeek: “Facebook now has 800 million users. Grumble as they might at the privacy and UI changes Facebook makes every few months, the users that comprise the vast social network stick around. – That’s user engagement, and by extension social advertising opportunities, Google can only aspire to at this stage.”
UG: “With Facebook’s recent introduction of the Timeline profile, the two networks are going to be quite different from one other – which is a good thing in my opinion. After all why would anybody want to use two of the same thing? Google is keeping it simple and minimalistic, while Facebook seems to be going in the opposite direction by letting users add even more about themselves on the network. Both services have their merits, so I guess we’ll continue to see users using Facebook and Google+ instead of completely migrating to one.“
Wyoming has officially gone Google: completed its transition to Google Apps for Government; http://eicker.at/WyomingGoogle
Facebook starts a Page Migration tool: convert Facebook Profiles to Facebook Pages; http://eicker.at/ProfilePageMigration
Facebook: “Since profiles are for meant individual people, they aren’t suited to meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures… Business accounts are designed for people who only want to use Facebook to administer Pages and run ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same features as personal accounts. … Be aware that when you convert your profile to a Page, your profile pictures will be transferred, and all of your friends will be automatically added as people who like your Page. No other content will be carried over to your new Page, so be sure to save any important content before beginning your migration. … Once you have converted your profile to a Page, you can’t revert this change. Please keep in mind that it is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to maintain a profile for anything other than an individual person.”
IF: “For the first time, Facebook now allows personal user profiles to be converted into official business Pages, turning all their friends into fans. The ‘Profile To Business Page Migration’ tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes. … Migration will be especially useful for users who initially planned to use their profile to promote a small business, such as an event promotion company or consultancy, but eventually hit Facebook’s 5000 friend limit. It will also allow those promoting a business with a personal profile to begin using third-party Page applications that allow them to set up a Like-gated landing page, run contests, collect email addresses, and recreate functionality from websites.”
FC: “With the launch of a new migration tool, Facebook is letting single users around the world create a more business-centric, limited form of Facebook entry that allows business to have thousands of ‘fans’ rather than acting as an interactive friend resource. … A user may choose to migrate to the Pages system because while it has restrictions, such as the inability to friend people or follow the usual social networking status-update shares, it does allow you to surpass the 5,000 friend limit because followers of a Page are ‘fans’ not ‘friends.'”
Wyoming is the 1st state in the USA to move all state government employees to Google Apps; http://eicker.at/Wyoming
Google: “Wyoming is a state of many firsts. In 1872, it became home to the world’s first national park – Yellowstone. In 1925, its citizens elected Nellie Tayloe Ross the first woman governor of a U.S. state. Now in 2010, we’re thrilled that Wyoming is the first state in the country to announce plans to move all state government employees to Google Apps for Government. … Many other states around the country are using Google Apps, including departments in Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, New York, and Oregon are also bringing Apps to their K-12 classrooms. All these governments are saving money while equipping their employees with modern collaboration tools that carry the assurance of federal government security certification.”
Wyoming: “Moving to one system for office technologies, including email, email encryption and security, instant messaging, groups, sites, calendar and video, will enable all state employees to easily communicate with each other, something that is not possible now. ‘The change to one email system will make communications better, faster and cheaper,’ said CIO Bob von Wolffradt. … ‘The economic impacts of migrating to a single system will result in $1 million of indirect savings annually, based on the 15 agencies not needing to own servers, licensing, and maintenance contracts or provide dedicated staff to manage the system internally,’ von Wolffradt explained. … Under a contract with Tempus Nova, the State of Wyoming will pay $5 million dollars to migrate e-mail systems to Google’s hosted email, security, e-discovery, encryption, and archive services and transition some 10,000 email accounts to the new services over the coming year.”
That’s insane!!
WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users; http://j.mp/d6uiip
WordPress.com: “We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com. – Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog. … We’re very happy that Microsoft chose WordPress.com as their preferred new blogging service for Windows Live users. It’s a sign of how strong WordPress.com has become, and credit for that goes to every one of you who’s been creating here.”
WordPress.com: “WordPress.com has partnered with Windows Live Spaces to upgrade your Space to a new WordPress.com site! This article will walk you through the upgrade process step-by-step to get you started. The upgrade is very easy to use and takes only a few steps to complete.”
Windows Live: “As we looked at customers’ blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com. … We’re very excited to work with WordPress.com to give our shared customers a great experience that connects the fantastic blogging capabilities on WordPress.com with the leading communications and sharing services on Windows Live. We hope you enjoy this too, and we look forward to partnering with even more great services from around the web.”
Gerrit Eicker 10:18 on 28. October 2011 Permalink |
Google: “Google Apps fans, today we’re ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at college, at work or at home. – Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organization. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days. … Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can’t be in the same room. … Many students and teachers have sent us their ideas about how they can use Google+ to teach, learn, work, and play. These are a few Google Apps for Education universities from around the world that are bringing Google+ to their campuses today… For those of you who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, we’re building a migration tool to help you move over. … It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience.”
RWW: “The day has finally come. Google Plus is now available for Google Apps customers. Apps administrators can now manually turn on Google Plus for their organizations. The welcome change will roll out in the ‘next several days.’ … Google Apps users have been crying out for Plus access since the beginning. These are the customers who actually pay Google to use its Web services for their organizations, and yet the Apps versions of Google’s tools routinely lag behind the free versions. … But ever since the public launch, Plus has had this killer feature with no clear user base: Google Docs in Hangouts. It’s an ideal way to collaborate on a project. But how often do casual friends collaborate on projects? Google Plus has had an obvious institutional use case for over a month. Now, at last, Google Apps users in college or the office can use these tools to get things done.”
VB: “While enabling Google+ for Google Apps customers is certainly a big move for the company, eventually Google plans to bring Google+ functionality to all of its various services (Gmail, search, shopping, etc.).”
TNW: “Using Google+ for Google Apps? Your admin has access to all of your data – If you’re a user of Google+ with a corporate or education Google Apps account, your administrator can access and modify your Google+ account and its postings. This information is pointed out in a Google help center topic related to the new feature: ‘Because you’re signing up for Google+ with your corporate email address, your Google Apps administrator retains the right to access your Google+ data and modify or delete it at any time.’ … The fact that an administrator has access to your accounts under Google Apps is nothing new, but this is the first time that Google has had a social network among its Apps offerings, so the privacy implications are a bit more severe.”
Google: “Whether it’s breaking news or beautiful photos, you just don’t want to miss anything. With this in mind, we’re launching ‘What’s Hot’ on Google+, a new place to visit for interesting and unexpected content… Google+ Ripples: watch how posts get shared – There’s something deeply satisfying about sharing on Google+, then watching the activity unfold. Comments pour in, notifications light up, friends share with friends [who share with their friends], and in no time at all there’s an entire community around your post. … Google+ Creative Kit: have more fun with your photos – Now you can add that vintage feel to your vacation photos. Or sharpen those snapshots from the family barbeque. Or add some text for added personality. With the Creative Kit, all you need is an idea…”
TC: “Google+ Resurrects Playback Feature From Wave, Renames It ‘Ripples’ – Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. … And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called ‘Playback’. … Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users ‘re-live’ the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. … In other words, Ripples is a ‘visualization tool for public shares and comments‘, which users can access by simply selecting the ‘View Ripples’ option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.”
TNW: “Google not only wants to show you what’s hot, but wants to show you how it got hot by showing you how a post was shared. The name also brings back memories of a previous Google product, ‘Wave’. … This is a pretty drastic upgrade for Google+, as until now, the only way to find posts that interested you was through its search function, or when your friends re-shared a post.”
VB: “Perhaps more interesting for the visually oriented is Google+ Ripples, a new way to watch how posts travel across the company’s set of social features and through various user’s circles. You can view the ‘ripples’ for any public post; this feature will show you all of that post’s activity. You can zoom in on specific events, check out top contributors and more.”