Kalovski Itim Online

Google+ For iPhone, iPad And iPod Gets Updated

Google has updated its Google+ app for iOS devices which include the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and the latest version comes with a range of bug fixes as well as some minor new features.

Google+ will now lets you re-share other users content with your friends on Google+, and Google has also added a number of performance enhancements to the latest version of Google+

You can find out more information about the latest version of Google+ for the iPhone, iPad and ipod Touch over at iTunes.

Facebook still unpopular with US consumers, survey finds, Why Google+ could spell trouble

In half a decade Facebook has become one of the most successful companies on earth but also, a new survey of US consumers has found, one of the least liked.

The level of Facebook’s unpopularity uncovered by the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) will make difficult reading for its management on a ranking that placed it 15^thfrom bottom of 227 companies across a variety of sectors.

Facebook is now at 66 on the ACSI index, two better than last year, but some way behind YouTube’s and CNN’s 74, Burger King’s 75, Microsoft’s 78 and Google’s 83. The top performers included Amazon and Unilever on 87, Apple on 86, Lexus on 85, and FoxNews on 82.

“Even with this year’s two-point increase, Facebook continues to register as one of the lowest-scoring companies measured by the ACSI,” said the report.

Below it lies a desert of traditionally-disliked companies such as airlines and mobile communications companies. The only company in a similar business to Facebook that scored as poorly was MySpace, which has plummeted so low it now no longer even registers as even being merely unpopular. It seems to have no measurable profile at all.

None of this would probably matter to Facebook or its users if it weren’t for the looming appearance of Google+, which for the first time offers consumers a competitive choice.

“Google is a company that has traditionally received ACSI scores in the 80s—it is among the highest-rated companies in terms of customer satisfaction. If Google can carry over their customer-centric ethos to Google+, Facebook could have serious competition that has the potential to very quickly erode its market share,” the authors conclude.

Facebook has had a difficult year over privacy issues culminating in an Orwellian plot to use PR firm to smear rival Google, a move that won it few admirers.

In the search engine market there seem to be two winners, Google and Bing. Ask.com, Yahoo, and AOL all appear register lower index scores, reflecting their much smaller market share.

Some of the preferences could be related to politics and image as much customer satisfaction; the more liberal HuffingtonPost.com scored a lowly 69 while the sometimes controversial FoxNews.com rated a much better 82.

Although it only measures US consumer opinion, the American Customer Satisfaction Index is calculated by ForeSee Results from 70,000 interviews carried out throughout the year.

Export Facebook friends to Google+ with Chrome browser extension Facebook Friend Exporter eases transition to new social network

The world is already abuzz about Google+, even though it’s not accessible to most. Still, many doubt that anyone, even the mighty one from Mountain View, can catch up to Facebook’s half a billion (at least) active users. Unless, maybe there was a simple way to import your Facebook friends to your Google+ Circles.

Inevitably, there is now an app for that. Actually, it’s a Chrome extension.

Facebook Friend Exporter is the work of developer Mohamed Mansour, a software engineer who works at Blackberry maker Research in Motion, according to his online resume (and his Google+ page), and develops open source tools in his spare time.

The extension wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind. In fact version 1 was released last November, but it has exploded in the past week as the limited number of Google+ beta users have gone searching for ways to port over their entire Facebook world to Google.

The extension essentially extracts the data for each one of your Facebook friends and then converts it to one huge data file or ports it into Google contacts. The process of extracting all of your friends’ data can be rather time-consuming, depending on your broadband speed and how many friends you have. After about half an hour, only 150 of my friends had been processed.

The app doesn’t instantly stuff all your Facebook friends right into Google+, either. It just makes them available in your Google contacts, so you can then move them into Circles on Google+. All in all, the multiple step process can take quite a while, and many users have reported problems ranging from getting “stuck” during the import process to crashed browsers.

On its face, the app seems to violate Facebook’s Terms of Service, but it’s been around for many months now with over 17,000 downloads. And Mansour is very upfront about his feelings on the matter, as he writes in the app’s description: “Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends.”

Of course, Facebook does allow you to download all your information, including wall posts, photos and friend data, all in one big chunk, but it’s not exactly a user-friendly chunk. Mansour’s Chrome extension isn’t a perfect solution to the problem of Facebook-to-Google+ migration either, but it’s a start.

Google+: The seven year struggle to deliver A history of Google’s battle to get social media right

Launching years after Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to look at Google as simply playing catch up in the social networking game with the release of its Google+ “field test.” But look back in time and it’s clear that Google has been playing in the social world for years, but never quite put all the pieces together in one place.

Here’s a chronological look at the long path Google has taken to form what could be the next big social network, if the company can pull off the mega-coup of convincing most of the half a billion Facebook users it has a better service.

2004 - Orkut: Google had a social network in place long before your Mom joined Facebook. Orkut was quietly launched more than 7 years ago to compete with Friendster, and it’s stayed quiet in the United States and most of the world, but has become the dominant social network in a few countries, most notably Brazil. Hilariously, it’s still in beta.

2006 - Gchat in Gmail: It seems like a pretty minor thing now, but integrating GChat into Gmail was one of the first steps Google took towards making one of its core products more social.

2007 - OpenSocial: Rather than re-invent the social wheel, Google first tried to co-opt existing social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn and Friendster via an open-source platform, but the initiative proved disappointing, initially working only with Orkut. It quickly faded away as Facebook’s dominance grew.

2008 - FriendConnect: Google’s next social strategy was a widget-based approach that allowed webmasters to add a “dash of social” to their sites. The number of sites using FriendConnect seems to be decreasing rapidly, with last countat over 138,000 worldwide.

2008 - Lively: Google’s answer to Second Life, this social experiment lasted less than six months, closing its virtual, 3-D doors on December 31, 2008.

February, 2009 - Latitude: Adding a social component to Google’s popular Maps seemed like an easy way to compete with FourSquare, although today it’s become perhaps best-known as a self-stalking tool for those obsessed with keeping track of their own movements. While Latitude never caught up with FourSquare, I’ll be shocked if its features don’t become key components of Google+.

May, 2009 - Google Wave: If there’s any reason to believe that Google+ might flop, it’s Wave. Meant to be an everything application, Wave was supposed to revolutionize real-time collaboration while incorporating social networking, well… kind of. It’s actually a little hard to describe, and it turns out it was hard to use as well.

August, 2009 - Social Gadgets for iGoogle: Google reprised the social widget concept first seen in FriendConnect with these small games and collaborative apps that could be added to users’ personalized iGoogle homepages. I was surprised tofind some of these gadgets still on my iGoogle page, which I haven’t visited for well over a year now.

February, 2010 - Google Buzz: Google’s answer to services like Digg and the epidemic of link-sharing on Facebook and Twitter never caught fire, but could get a second life on Google+.

February, 2010 - Aardvark: This social answers site had a small cult following long before Quora. Google purchased it and moved it to Google Labs, where it has languished, perhaps waiting to be folded into Google+?

October, 2010 - Social Search: This is Google’s attempt to gather the valuable data from the social graph that Facebook has and Google so covets because it could be the next evolution of search. Many Google users have become used to these added search results by now, although I haven’t found them too useful. This is another no-brainer for eventual integration into Google+.

August, 2010 - Slide: Google bought this social gaming company just under a year ago, and little else has been heard on the topic, but it’s interesting to note that the company has such a division under its big tent as Plus rolls out.

July, 2011 - Google+: It’s been a while since such a limited closed beta has generated so much excitement. Google+ has the potential to bring together all the lessons learned from the aforementioned social adventures, not to mention integration of Google’s many other recognized properties, not the least of which are Picasa, YouTube and Android. Then again, it also has the potential to become just another entry in this very long list.