Why Your Girlfriend Won’t Use Google+ (⊙o⊙)

It seems that Facebook vs. Google Plus is becoming an endless topic. I know, I've written too many  'chirp, chirps' about this in my blog, but, you will never be tired quarrelling with some friends about a battle between Manu Awesome & Liverpool Sucks. ╮(╯_╰)╭ 

OK, I’ve been putting many hours into Google+. In just the few days, wrote many dozens of posts there, and have thoroughly used the product.  I’ve also tried to get some normal users into the product,after sharing this experiences with other friends in my training house,  who have done the same this as silly as a toad, I’ve come to some conclusions. Here’s the biggie:

your girlfriend won’t use Google+! \(^o^)/

How can I state that so clearly? Easy. Most “average users” are locked into Facebook and aren’t willing to consider a new social tool until they hear about it from their friends. Since most of the people who are on Google+ so far are geeks, insiders, social media stars, journalists,since Google admitted 'they are only accepting people who have strong social graphs so that they can both make sure everyone has a good first experience as well as test out some of the technology before opening it up to a wider audience'. the chances normal people won’t hear about Google+ from normal users for quite a while. =_=

By then I’m sure Facebook will react Google+’s best features, Facebook already has called 'a press conference for next week where they are going to announce something “awesome”'. This will mean that normal users, who aren’t really going to get involved at this point in Google+’s life, won’t feel the need to switch.

So, what is Google+ for then?

It’s for us!

let’s just be honest here. There are pieces of Google+ that are mighty geeky.

Let’s start with how to bold and italicize text. Do you have a pretty editing window like, say, exists on Quora? No way.

To bold text you surround that text with asterisks. *Like this* GEEKY ALERT! Italicize? Put underscores around the text. Strikeout? 

And that’s just the little thing. Let’s talk about the big thing. Circles. Now, heavy and passionate users of social media, like myself, really love things like lists and groups. Why? Because we want to spend hundreds of hours making sure our social graphs are really organized.

Normal people do NOT do this. They just want to friend their 20 real-life friends and 30 family folks and be done with it. Average/normal users want the system just to bring them fun stuff without doing any work.

See, if you put the average Silicon Valley geek in front of a TV and tell him to sit on the couch and watch TV for four hours they won’t know what to do. They will start building databases of their favorite shows, start figuring out how to optimize their DVRs so they can fast-forward through commercials faster, and stuff like that.

Normal/average users? They just want to watch TV and drink beer.

So, you getting where I’m going with this? Google+ is for the passionate users of tech. If you just want to sit back and have the system do all the work, then Facebook is gonna be where you stay, especially since your friends are gonna lock you in for quite some time. But if you want to really be able to choose who you listen to, then Google+ is much better.

Oh, and that’s not even considering the new “Hangout” videochat feature. Damn that thing is cool. You can have 10 people call into a room and it lets you all talk to each other. I haven’t used Skype since that shipped.

Anyway, it’s clear Google has turned a corner. They have now proven to everyone that they can do social and get on the playing field.

But they haven’t yet proven that they can convince your grilfriend to use it and that’s just fine with me.

5 conversions you can apply for your blog

I didn’t know Bnonn, author of Attention Thievery, but I’ve trusted James’s unassuming nature and practical advice on trying to attract more visitors and increase freelance income for several days. 


As I listened to Bnonn’s friendly, savvy delivery of each point.I kept switching screens to my own website and noting the things I could do myself right that moment–or any moment. Some things I started doing immediately, and in all there were five changes I think you can also make immediately. So I changed up the title a bit and here they are.

Images. “If your images are not supporting your copy, then they’re distracting your reader from your copy,” says Bnonn. Make people want to find out what’s going on when they see the image. And the only way to do that is to read what you wrote. So make the connection clear. Also, try to place them to the right side of the screen so they don’t push the margin uncomfortably over (insert high-speed video of me frenetically shifting photos on blog posts).

Navigation. Please don’t make people guess what’s behind the door marked “Campfire” and what’s behind the door marked “Matchbook” on your indie film site. They won’t. They will run screaming (I have). Use conventional nomenclature like “Home,” “About,” “Products,” etc. for the main pages. You can get cute on the “extra” pages where people go to really get to know you.

Headlines. Most people have far more confidence in the effectiveness of their content than that of their headlines. Introduce elements of specificity, helpfulness, immediacy, newsworthiness, or entertainment. Try tweaking a headline on a page or blog post, adding one of these attention-getting elements, and share it. See what happens.

Call to action. I ranted about the lack of calls to action on websites last week, and Laura Click wrote the answer to the question I begged this week. A few tips Bnonn added: remember that people don’t come to your site wanting to buy, so gradualize your call to action. Try asking them to learn more about your offer, with specific benefits. Incidentally, large orange “Click Here” buttons test best. I thought, I’m good, mine are red, right next to orange–“red tests badly.” Ohhhhh… They’re silver now.

Footer. You know how you scroll down to the bottom of a site when you can’t seem to find the customer service page or address at the top? I thought it was just me, but apparently not. Put your entire navigation and contact information in your footer. It gives people confidence in your existence as a “real” establishment. Formatting all the links in this theme just didn’t go well for me so I took out everything but my contact info. I’ll be trying it again soon.

Bonus: On the typography front, Bnonn confirms my triumphant post that sans-serif is not “more readable” than serif font, contrary to popular belief. So go nuts. But not with Courier, he says, because it looks uneven since the letters are all the same width.

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/