Facebook and Google+ Battle It Out In The Social Network Arena

Google+ is a month old and is playing catch-up with Facebook, which is set to go on a public offering next year. Google needs to gain a lot of ground if it wants to be number one social network. At present, Facebook has 750 million users.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt acknowledged that his company was late in coming to the social network market. It is important for consumers to have an online identity and personalization that could provide lucrative commercial success for the company.

Google has invested in a lot in different things, such as video communities and mobile operating systems but the core of its business is still its search engine. It was because of search that fueled the boom of online content and the company doesn’t see social data as a replacement for search. Instead, the search giant views it as another layer that accesses data in a different manner.

Google+ is seen as an intelligently designed social network but analysts say it lacked the human focus required for a social network. It was this factor that boosted Facebook’s popularity. This is the reason why it has 750 million registered users.

But the bottom line is the profits. Estimates show that Facebook ad revenues will grow from $0.74 billion in 2009 to $5.7 billion in 2012. 97 percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising.

View the original article here

Google+ Grows But Remains A Minor Social Network

Google newest social network project, Google+, is still on its beta release but its user base is fast growing. But according to Hitwise, Facebook remains the top social network and Google+ still has a lot of ground to cover.

According to Hitwise, Google+ ranks 42 among social networking sites and took the 638th spot among the web sites in the United States in the week ending July 16. This is a big jump from the week ending July 9 when Google’s social network was ranked 2,404th of all the web sites in the United States.

You need to be invited by a current member of Google+ to be able to join the newest social network. The company designed its content-sharing and privacy features to attract people that are uncomfortable with Facebook’s privacy settings and policies.

Facebook seems unfazed by Google+’s growth. Its own growth is undiminished with more than 750 million members and the average users on the site continue to increase their amount of time on the site. Visits to Google+ is more than 1.8 million in the week ending July 16, which is up 283 percent compared to the previous week.

Most of the comments about Google+ have been positive so far. It is a sign that more people would join the social network once it opens up to the public.

View the original article here

Another Location Based Social Network from Yogyakarta

Dailysocial readers must know the local location based social services such as Yahoo! Koprol, Urbanesia, and Personaflag, for Yogya, beside Personaflag there is another location based social service called t4nya.com.

This one social media is quite interesting, has a slight difference from the others and a little bit unique. The first approach is mark a favorite location and then user can add photos, give score and comment to the place they’ve visited before, able to find places, location and new relations.

It’s quiet interesting from UI and UX side and also user friendly. The users have been given the privilege to add important places or their own favorite location on the map. It’s easy to add places and the funny icons display in each category made me comfortable in using t4nya.com. Even though it’s still in beta version, t4nya.com is such an addictive social service.

For users the registration process is very simple, you don’t need to fill in a registration form, simply login with your Facebook account. It’s also easy to add favorite places or important places with photos include in it, captions and comments on the site is very easy in t4nya.com. After the above process, users can also share their activities to Facebook and Twitter.

But when we visit t4nya.com there aren’t many people using this service yet. But some of the important or favorite places had already been add, especially in Yogyakarta, whether it’s a vacation spot, restaurant, and other places. Like other local service, t4nya.com also facilitate users to search or review places that their interested on.

When trying to add more places in t4nya.com, the process is quite simple. Giving name, give a description, giving a tag on a certain location, giving location a category and put a marker on a location. But the given category from the service is still limited. I try to add a place called HackerSpaceYK in t4nya.com, in just a matter of minutes. Unlike Yahoo! Koprol, a few months ago there was an ‘incident’ experienced by colleagues in Bandung.

Too bad, currently t4nya.com can only be access from the web, right now the mobile web and mobile app is still under development. Just like their explanation in their official blog, t4nya.com needs all the critics and suggestion for their references so they can develop their service and fix all the bugs. For suggestion and critics can be send from their feedback form or comment in this article.

View the original article here