10 Tips of Google+ for new use

Google+ is a social networking service operated by Google Inc.. The service launched on June 28, 2011 in an invite-only "field testing" phase. The following day, existing users were allowed to invite friends, who are above 18 years of age. This was suspended the next day due to an "insane demand" for accounts.

Google+ integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services Circles, Hangouts, Sparks, and Huddles, which may be a little hard for your initial experiences.

That’s why you may consider yourself a noob when it comes to Google’s social platform. But, here, fortunately, we’ve got some handy hints to help you out. From quicker sharing options to better content curation via savvy privacy settings, we’re bringing you 10 tips and tricks that will soon have you Google Plussing like a pro.

Please share in the comments any Google+ tips we haven’t mentioned — your suggestion could be featured in a forthcoming NETGAINS  BLOG article.

1. Add More Information to Your Profile Description

To most Google+ ‘strangers’, you're just a thumbnail. If they do care to hover over your avatar, then you're a thumbnail with a few words of description, likely your company name, profession or location.

There's a simple "hack" that can make Google+ display much more info when someone hovers over your avatar -- similar to the appearance of Twitter.

Go to edit your profile, select the employment section, and in the first "Employer name" box, write your bio and check the "current" box.

2. Organize Content With Circles

Circles are a useful tool for organization of content. Thanks to the fact you can create empty circles, there's a variety of organizational options open to you.

As Google+ currently has no way of bookmarking content, Plussers have devised workarounds.

You can create empty circles to "share" under different headings. Make "bookmarks" for links you want to check out when you have more time, "read later" for longer posts and articles, and even "test" if, you want to muck around on the service without annoying your followers.

Once you've set this up and shared content to your various empty circles, viewing that circle's stream will bring up all the Plus bits you wanted to save.

3. Click on Profile Pictures to Roughly Browse

One really neat trick Google has built into Plus is the ability to scroll through all of a user's uploaded profile pictures directly from the profile or posts page.

You can do this by clicking on the person's avatar image at the top left of the screen. If they have added more than one pic, Plus will flip through the album there and then.

While on one hand this is a handy way to see profile pics at-a-glance, some Plussers have gotten creative with the concept.

4. Disable Sharing on Posts

One of our favorite things about Google+ is limited, rather than public, sharing. You can share a post with one person -- or the entire world.

However, there's nothing to say that one person won't click "share" to expose your previously private post to the entire world.

Thankfully, Google+ offers the ability to disable sharing on posts. If you've posted something you'd like to stay private, click on the drop down menu arrow at the top right of the post and select "disable re-share."

Do be aware this doesn't mean people can't screengrab your post, etc, but it will at least communicate that you'd like the post to stay private.

5. To Find Post’s Permalinks

If you want to find a post's permalink, it's simple. If the post was shared publicly, you can hit the drop down menu arrow at the top right and select "link to this post." This will open the post in a separate tab, allowing you to copy and past its URL.

If the post has limited sharing options, this setting won't appear in the drop down menu. Instead, click on the time or date stamp toward the top of the post. This will also open the post in a new window and reveal the URL, although not everyone will be able to view it.

6. Drag and Drop Content

If you expand the "share" box, you can drag and drop content into it. This works for video, photos, links and even other Plus profiles.

7. Change the Visibility of Your Circles

Google+ displays all people in your circles at random on your profile. However, you can change the default options to show only certain circles and hide others.

In Google's own words, this is so you can "hide that weird aunt you’re embarrassed about, and show off the coolest people you know."

To change your circle settings, click "Edit profile" and then hit the circles boxes on the left of your screen. You can now choose which circles you want the world to see, and even decide whether to display people who have added you to circles.

8. Notify People About the Posts

Rather than risk burying an important post in the stream, Google+ offers a way to notify people in a circle about the post, without having to add their Google+ username.

To set it up, click on the circle you're sharing and check the "notify about this post" box.

9. Add Special Photo Effects

Click on one of your photos to bring up the dark background view, then hit the "Actions" menu at the bottom right. In addition to useful options such as "Auto Contrast" and "Auto Color," you can also Cross Process, Orton-ize, or turn your image black and white.

As far as we can tell, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option will randomly apply an effect.

10. Google+ URLs

Did you know you can find Google+ at various URLs? There's:

http://google.com/+

http://plus.google.com, and

http://google.com/plus.

Shadowy High-Speed-Railway and growing civic awareness in China---have-to-say words

A while back, I had a long enjoyable chat till dawn with my roommate, Maxime De Techtermann, about the democracy in China and India,he spoke highly of the high-speed railway in China, and set it as an example, 'Last year I paid a visit to China for business communication, instead of airplanes (cause the airport is too far away from the downtown), I took a train from Shanghai to Beijing. Over 1300km in 5 hours, Ricky, this is gorgeous, Chinese government finally do something good despite the clever foreign economic strategy.  That’s the forceful advantage of despotic government. You can profit massively from this in 10 years.'

Yes, we can. But what you should notice is that, for months, doubts and accusations have also swarmed on  China’s high-profile push to develop its high-speed rail system. But harder questions — about corruption, waste, quality, safety, service and intellectual property — were submerged , pushing claims of technological superiority to win political points, which is a everyone-knows secret.

Fortune or misfortune, we got a tragic opportunity to prove now.

A collision between two trains on July 23rd near the coastal city of Wenzhou-famous for its east-jews businessmen, not only killed at least 35 people (most of the people believe it’s over 60), but also unleashed a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy which has whipped up a new wave of public anger toward the Ministry of Railways —toward the government more generally — and brought a new and crazy sharing of information online, even as authorities have moved quickly to stem media coverage.

For many Chinese, one of the most frustrating aspects of this story has been the government’s apparent unwillingness to answer the most basic questions, and its tendency to fall back on fuzzy responses.

Actually, 3 accidents have already happened in a row in July due to the same reasons, all eyes on china’s new high-speed rail, the questions are: why there was no contingency plan, why passengers had not been compensated, why backup power systems had not been used . Responses from the Ministry of Railways were not forthcoming at first, as then claimed that ‘it was only natural that the high-speed rail needed time to work out the kinks.’

The tension between real answers and propaganda seemed to boil over at yesterday’s press conference with Wang Yongping(王勇平), the Ministry of Railways spokesman. Especially when Wang was asked yesterday how it was possible that a five-year-old girl was found alive after officials had declared an end to the search and rescue, Wang responded: ‘That was a miracle. ‘shouts erupted among the reporters, “It is NOT a miracle! It is NOT a miracle!”  The reporters didn’t want to hear more nonsense. They wanted to know exactly why the girl had not been found earlier, and what her discovery revealed about the nature and handling of the search and rescue itself.

The internet has proved a powerful  public monitor in China, especially since Twitter-like services, which called sina-weibo, began to take off 2 of years ago. I have to say, Twitter-like sina-weibo is not a perfect information resources, cause the numerous of rumors and analysis-less opinions, but at least, it’s a progress of civic awareness.In this case, it has provided real-time, uncensored insights into a disaster that the authorities would doubtless have preferred to be covered in another style by trusted party organs like the Xinhua News Agency.

This accident is a tragedy.I convince accidents in general are unavoidable, and they happen everywhere. But this accident can be entirely avoidable  if railway authorities had taken the design and construction of the trains more seriously, or alternately, if they had listened to the warnings coming from all areas of society over the past few weeks and stopped the operation of high speed trains until the obviously serious problems could be fixed.

Then to turn around society is making a progress more or less, especially the rising of civic awareness, it's not rational yet and sometimes is lack of analysis and independent or critical thoughts in most cases, but 'half a loaf is better than no bread'. 信不信由你，反正我信:)

Reference:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/27/dc-metro-crash-ntsb-report-safety_n_661553.html

http://cmp.hku.hk/2011/07/11/13686/

http://chinageeks.org/2011/07/death-on-the-high-speed-rail/

http://cmp.hku.hk/2011/07/13/13764/

How to prevent your Google+ Account from being banned

Recently, not only the majority of business accounts, but also some personal Google plus accounts are audited which appears to be a suspended phenomenon. I believe that, in most cases, it’s triggered by the inconsistence between the user name/ Google private and Google+’s  community criteria.

Google does not force users to use their real names, but , to some extent, the user name must comply with Google's relevant guidelines.

Real-name authentication is not implemented

Google + hasn’t taken up any practical implementation of real-name authentication, therefore, a lot of network marketers pretend to be celebrities and use their names to register accounts due to the lack of restriction.

For instance, Ma Ying-jeou(马英九), the 12th term and current President of the Republic of China, was trapped because someone registered a Google+ Account using the name as ‘President Ma Ying-jeo’,  and then manually sync Ma Ying-jeou’s Facebook information to Google+. Soon afterwards, Google+ team banned this account. And perhaps for security considerations and to put an end to the recurrence of this kind of events, the real President Ma sighed in an account immediately.

In the foreseeable future, Google may imitate Twitter launching real-name authentication mechanism, which will enable users to distinguish the real celebrities from the fakes. It will definitely strengthen the validity of the information resources and protect the reputation of the celebrities as well.

Google’ s  Policy

Google does not force users to use their real names, but users need to meet certain rules written in the Google+ "User Content and Conduct Policy":

‘To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable.’

The more detailed description of the Google+ policy, check ‘Your name and Google Profiles’:

‘Use your full first and last name in a single language.
If you use your full name, you'll help people find you online and connect with the right person. Note that professional titles such as "Dr." or "Prof." aren't allowed in the first or last name fields. If you’re referred to by more than one name, just choose one, and place the others in the “Other names” section of your profile.

Avoid unusual characters in your name.
When you create your profile, our system will check the name you submitted for unusual characteristics. For example, numbers, symbols, or obscure punctuation might not be allowed.

Your profile and name must represent one person.
Google Profiles doesn’t support profiles for couples or groups of people. Additionally, you can’t create a profile for a non-person entity such as a pet or business. Google may continue to allow existing profiles that don’t meet these criteria, as long as the profile names are unchanged.

Don’t use the name of another individual.
Impersonation is a serious issue. Pretending to be someone else could cause your profile to be deleted. If someone is pretending to be you, go to their profile and click Report this person.’

In short, user-name strategy is to: 1) Do not mix the name with several different languages; 2) Do not use non-personal accounts (such as business accounts, web accounts, news accounts, etc.); 3) Do not impersonate another person.

From here you can see, Google + does not force users to use their real names, but users should use their usual name, if the user profile is suspended, that means  the user name is inconformity with Google Policy, Then the user will receive a notification to review the profile.

Users can click on the Google profile page contact us, put forward further appeal applications, in most cases can get a response within 24 hours after filling the form.  It’s not necessary to fill out the real name, common nick name or screen name can be accepted. But if it is commonly used screen name, you need to fill out the complaint form with sites profile page URL  corresponding to Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites.

The user can edit their names or personal information even the user's personal profile is suspended. But, if users edit their own profiles under the suspended status, Google team still need to review the user's name, and then re-activate the user's personal information.

Drawbacks

In my opinion, it is controversial for Google team sticking to their policy under the current situation of Google+. If the user name does not meet the policy, Google should set limit during registering, rather than banning the accounts suddenly after a long period’s experience, which can be destructive to the user experience. 

Even if Google+ determined to suspend the user account, it’s better to contact the user first and give them some time to amend the profile to meet the policy of Google, rather than give a red card directly without any notification.

It’s maybe a little difficult for the Googlers who are mostly engaged in engineering to understand how important the user experience and hommization design are in SNS. In all probability, that can be a large stumbling block if Google+ really want to challenge the supremacy of Facebook and Twitter in social network field.

And someone also pointed out the potential harm to the users in community caused by real-name policy:

      I.        Online and offline harassment.

    II.        Employment and service discrimination.

   III.        The reality of physical threats.

  IV.        Arrest, imprisonment or judicial control.

    V.        The economic harm, such as job loss, loss of professional reputation and so on.

In general,  in the process of creating an account,  the name should be in line with Google's policy to avoid personal account banned by Google.
 if Google user's personal account was suspended or deleted, the user will not only  be unable to use Google+ community, but also impossible to use other Google products such as Buzz and Google +1 which are all personal-information-required. However, users of Gmail and Blogger accounts are not affected by this restriction.

Reference: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/22/spat-of-the-day-google-removes-business-profiles/

http://www.google.com/intl/zh-EN/+/policy/content.html

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/21/vic-gundotra-on-how-google-handled-brands-it-was-probably-a-mistake/

http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=1228271

https://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=name_appeal

The Social Travel Revolution

No need to explain, check the pic below!!