Google, the leading online resource provider has started concentrating more on increasing its market and to spread on social space. Google has taken necessary steps in maintaining and providing all its services linked with its social asset, Google Plus. This is not the only thing has been taken into consideration by Google, but they have also started recreating the Android Market, now called as Google Play and it seeks for some cushion for quality and trust in the market. The market has been hit badly as consumers have shown interest in just downloading free programs, which Google is trying to overcome. So, to restructure the market, Google renamed it as Google Play that has drawn a lot of customer towards it, just like Google search and Gmail.
This Google Play label has been made available as a tool on the top of Google search page with a red ‘New’ label attached to it, with an idea to draw more people towards its market for buying programs. Earlier, Google had made a mistake by allowing all the users to post any app that could also include some trash apps. In case of Apple, they have just kept the order as same as it appears on the Apple Store, which confirms the flow of large movement of customer using quality applications. On the other side, Google Play has to cross a lot of barriers in reaching customers which had come to the mind of Google in making a name change.
However, it is clearly visible that Google has consolidated movies, music, books, audio and other digital goods on Google Play. This is done with the idea to cross-sell all the products for people visiting the Android application market. The output of these changes is still in the bank as it will take time for it to burst out in the later stages when they start satisfying customer needs.
Google plays a fair game using Google Play
Can Google Plus overcome Facebook’s challenge?
A new announcement on Facebook photo features have took another crown from Google Plus. This has put brakes on the desires of the Google team in improving their social media network among public. There are various ideas prescribed by users to improve the look and feel of Google Plus to engage people a considerable amount of time. There was heavy competition among Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter, and people have shown interest to see a formatted, dynamic and more information posts on a general blog site. Recently Facebook has added a few new interesting features that have created a buzz among its users. Google has responded to this new feature of Facebook by providing search engine, video hangouts and You Tube integration to draw customers towards its network. The search engine feature available is not as advanced compared to Facebook as it misses several features. One lacking feature of Google Plus is that there is no possibility to see every item a user has liked.
There are various suggestions from fans of Google Plus to improve its reach to people. The main thing is to provide options to enrich the About page that contains details about family members, relationship status, views on social matters, favorite celebrity, books, authors, personalities, sports, teams and other social things. The Google team can also provide tiny network and circle me option to create events and pages for group of people. The page should have options for different fonts, background images, logos and themes that give a smart and grandeur look. It is also necessary to have an efficient Application Programming Interface (API), which will create attraction among the users of this site.
There are also a few bugs in Google Plus, which has to be fixed in order to strengthen its grip over the social networking site. Every URL in Google Plus looks lengthy and makes it hard for user to post. The limitations have to be completely avoided as it may help people to follow their most liked personalities. Providing a blogging tool integrated with Google Plus will help in posting the data directly to their related blogs. It is important to provide permission to add videos and photos along with our comments that are getting posted. By following all these measures, Google Plus can eventually overcome its competitors and reach the top level in social networking websites.
Three Major Internet Company’s Web Protest against SOPA & PIPA Bill
Many copyright holders are fighting to protect their unique and quality website contents from copyright infringements For an Eg: Take movie studio, the investment & hard work behind a movie are very huge and many online free movie watching websites are easily streaming the pirated version of original movie videos. Not only movie production websites, but also the content creators who create unique contents in the websites.
What is SOPA/ PIPA bill?
SOPA is an Anti-piracy bill which was introduced by Texas republican Lamar amith along with his 12 co-sponsors on October 26th 2011. SOPA applies to both domestic & foreign websites, but PIPA applies to foreign websites only.
The current law in SOPA bill is that the government allows copyright holders to request the court to issue orders against the websites with copyright infringements. After receiving the court order, the targeted website will be given 5 days stand to prosecute against the charge on them, if the targeted website not infringed the copyrights else it will be cut out in the following ways:
- Google will remove that targeted website from its search results.
- Hosting service providers will be notified by the copyright holders to stop the hosting and making the site to be unreachable to the people.
- All kind of payment processors like PayPal and ads services will stop providing payment gateways to the targeted website.
Right now discussions are going on to change the SOPA law in the way to shutdown the entire copyright violated website without any prosecution in court. This will affect the many major internet companies like Google, Wikipedia and Mozilla.
How will SOPA affect the Google, Wikipedia and Mozilla?
For an Eg. If a Google+ user shares a video from pirate bay in their circles, it will be taken as the Google+ supports the copyright infringements. In this case, that concerned copyright holder has the right to ask the Google to shut down the Google+ without any judicial proceedings and this is same to Wikipedia and others. That’s why these three major internet companies protested against SOPA by Jan 19th and many would have seen the protests on the following ways.
Projected User Base for Google Plus by 2012: 400 Million
Google plus has just 62 million users as of now. But this number is expected to grow exponentially. This is no prediction, but strongly based on the fact that there are almost 700,000 Android based operating systems that are being activated every day. This combined with the factor that every day Google is aggressively combining all its Products, will help in the expansion of Google Plus. Paul Allen’s Ancestry.com reports that every day 625,000 new Google Plus users are added and if this continues it can end up in some where around 300 million profiles.
But there is a vector quantity named Acceleration involved in it. This can make the change and can make the total user base to be around 400 million. Google is also expected to encourage the developers into developing more and more applications that will boost user entertainment levels in Google Plus. Despite the growing user base it will be quite interesting to see the number of active user count.
Google+ Users increased to 90 Million and 300 Million Users by Dec 2012
Records have once again proved Google+ to be the fastest growing social networking website with advanced features. Many experts are tracking the growth of Google+ very closely and one among them is Paul Allen. He predicted the Google+ growth rates very accurately in the past. Now, he claims that Google+ has 90 million users and 625000 new users are signing up every day.
He supports his theory for the hike in Google+ users due to holidays where users could have sent greetings to their friends through Social Networks, Automatic signups to Google+ via Android 4 mobile phones, commercial ads in TV, celebrity appeal or even word of mouth advertising. Moreover, he advocates that Google+ has more number of new user signups and it has increased in the past weeks. Allen is the founder of ancestry.com, which is all about genealogy & tracking family history records, he follows a strange approach to derive his estimates about Google+. Since July, he has been tracking thousands of queries on the surnames in Google+ and finally extrapolated the network size.
He reports that Google+ will reach 300 million users exactly on Dec 2012, 200 million users by Aug 2012 and 100 million users by Feb 2012. But his prediction fails to count the number of active users among the 62 million users and it is seen as a negative aspect. As per the Experian hitwise, those active users are just a fraction of Google+’s base. The most recent week tracking of hitwise found that Google+ has reached a total visitor count to 9.4 million by the ending week of dec17th and it is a nice improvement in the Google+’s total visit compared to the weeks in November which was 7.2 million.
Educational Videos in ‘YouTube for Schools’
GET READY FOR THE BIGGEST ONLINE SCHOOL EVER!!!
The greatest video search website of Google, You Tube, has now taken steps to enhance the education standards to peak level. The new service of Google, “YouTube for Schools” is accepted already by many urban parents. This news has been released when the creative head of YouTube EDU, Angelina Lin addressed the media saying that YouTube for schools is a technical project of Google that allows schools to make use of YouTube, a place where normally the access to YouTube is banned.
This new step is taken by Google only a few days ago with a hope of transforming the art of teaching into fun. YouTube education has about 4.5 millions of educational videos specially designed for children. Anyone who wants to get more information about ‘YouTube in school’, can have a look at the youtube educational videos from the link named as ‘YouTube Education’.
This website has been made so user friendly that parents and teachers can even prevent thier children from watching videos that are unfit for them. The greatest benefit in the ‘youtube educational videos for kids’ is that there is no ‘related videos’ section in the video page and also the comments section is been disabled. This online YouTube school has lead to the formation of a new era, where learning will meet fun.
Considering the rapid transformation of normal classrooms into smart classrooms, Google has taken an innovative step for enhancing the concept of infotainment. Though this kind of education methodology is difficult to be adapted by the rural schools, the technological advancement is growing with such a high speed that the day is not far when the difference between the urban and rural areas will completely get vanished.
Google News gets Google Plus
After many surprises, Google+ has introduced a new feature in Google news, the “+1 feature”. If a reader likes a news article he/she finds on Google news, he/she can click the +1 option. This is very much similar to the Facebook’s like feature. The article will be automatically visible in the user’s Google reader and their circles. This is in fact a smart move by Google. Meanwhile Critics ignore the fact that Google+ did not come in a day.
Many software engineers worked several hours in the making of Google+. Orkut is or was a sensational social networking site of Google. But many experts are interested in highlighting only the flaws in Google plus. Google+ has TV, music and news including a refined chat approach. Some features of Google plus has not been disclosed but they will astonish us very soon. Explore the world of Social media with the new Google plus feature.
Chat with mutual friends in Google Plus
In Twitter, a message can be sent only when both the sender and receiver follow each other. So, how good it would be if we can communicate with people whom WE JUST KNOW as a mutual friend? At the same time our personal information should not be revealed, unless we decide to be a direct friend of them. Google’s Engineers thought in the same way and we now have this new feature of Chatting with mutual friends in Google Plus.
In short this means that any one in any of your circle can chat with us, but our email addresses will be kept unknown. Cool isn’t it? Face book too has a similar feature of chatting with mutual Face book friends. But Google has gone a step further by allowing us to connect with mutual friends when we use any of these following applications. iGoogle, Orkut, Google Plus, Gmail chat and the talk client.
Can this be seen as a progressive move? Yes and No. Children and teenagers will now get a chance to talk with more friends whom they JUST KNOW. There are very high chances of this being misused. Still it’s a Yes for a professional who is looking to connect with a not so well known possible partner/potential client.
Google Plus: Photography Contest For Students
There is good news for student lovers of photography via Google +. In conjunction with Saatchi Gallery, London, Google + has made an announcement of the first ever Google photography prize. Really, it doesn’t matter whether you are an armature or an experienced photographer; all that matters is for you to be a tertiary student aged 18 or over. Google is looking for photographs from students who fall within this category. It’s really interesting recounting just how many photos were uploaded to Google plus during its first hundred days in existence. Google, through the photography prize, has an objective to showcase the social media platform as a real venue for sharing and exploring photography.
Entrants are allowed a maximum upload of eight photographs in any of ten categories such as food, travel, action, as well as street photography. Submissions are evaluated and the best 100 are chosen for short listing. Ten finalists are then chosen by a jury of photography professionals. These finalists usually have their work showcased in Saatchi Gallery, London. They get to win a trip to London in the company of a friend to attend the opening event. Finally, the overall winner enjoys a trip to an undisclosed destination in the company of a professional photography coach. At the moment, the competition is ongoing, with a deadline of 31st January, 2012. All who qualify are, therefore, entreated to get enrolled.
Key strategies set by Google to keep up its market
Filed under G+ Tips & Tricks by Jasa Lance on April 2, 2012 at 6:54 pm {no comments}Google has started its strategy to overcome the competitors in the social media sites. They have apparently planned to launch their own third-party net commenting platform in helping users to provide their response on various sites. Meanwhile, Google has also started promoting its application store via Google Play and links it with Google Plus. Considering this move by Google, it seems like they have not shown more interest in ad searches and searching files through the net.
Recently, a meeting was held at G-Saudi Arabia to discuss about developing Google’s social site. One such thing is to provide a new commenting platform for the Google user. Earlier, the platform will link with other Google’s online services, where users browsing anywhere can be linked to Google Plus network. They have also integrated the Android device market along with Google Play, to expose various Google’s web products available on market to its users.
Another new thing considered by Google is posting URL in Google Plus. People were not allowed to post comments and share images along with URL using Google Plus in the past, this was a mistake that Google did previously. Facebook, exploded with the help of ‘likes’ on various websites that helped to increase the number of people using Facebook as a third-party commenting platform. This provides two benefits for user – he or she doesn’t have to create a separate new profile on every site they visit and those people who are commenting can be easily identified resulting in responsible posts. Thus, Google sensitively started building social network-centric services that will improve the flow of heavy traffic from user resulting in new business opportunities.