Almost a month has gone since Google+ opened up for open beta meaning that you no longer need an invitation to join Google+.
The move has been so well received by the public that growth shot up to 1269% according to Experian hitwise. The graph below:
Google+ open beta growth
Apologies for not writing lately but I have been busy with my app.
I’ll try to wrap up this post pretty quickly as I am pretty sure by now, a lot of people have access to Google+ since they opened their doors to the public last week.
After we looked at circles last time, we will be looking at hangouts, sparks, huddle and instant uploads.
Well well, I finally got my invite for Google+, thanks to a good friend.
The first thing that I did was play around with circles.
Google’s video on circles:
Last week I got upgraded to Facebook’s new messaging system. So this means I have my own facebook email and get updates via text in addition to chat.
So I had this friend who called me up and wanted to buy an iPhone or HTC Desire HD (Android OS). He wanted to know which phone between the two he should get. I have to mention that my friend is an average phone user and not very techy yet he knew what android was and it was the other alternative OS to an iPhone. Here are details of the conversation…
Me: “So why do you want to use a smartphone, you only use your phone to call your wife anyway?”
Friend: “I want be able to access internet because at work I can’t deal with my shares since they blocked the sites. I want something fast or even better an app.”
Within the last couple of years, facebook has been trying to improve its privacy settings. Is it enough? Privacy is a big issue not only on the web but even in real life. The most vulnerable areas of your facebook account are your status and wall.
Status updates are a great way to keep friends up-to-date with all the latest happenings in your profile but so are strangers. One common status update seen on facebook would be something that sounds like this “Wooooohoooo Las Vegas here I come baby…“. Sounds familiar! Status updates like this are more likely to lead to burglars becoming aware of your absence from home. Should I say that some people do add people randomly, even the ones they don’t know. Having a huge number of friends in their profile makes them look cool from their pespective. Sure you can easily disable everyone from seeing your status updates via the privacy settings but the status update is linked with posts as well and disabling this disables viewing of all your posts, including those you make on other people’s wall and pictures, something I am sure people would not be too keen on. Location based updates using facebook’s places are also a potential threat to giving away your location.
