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Setting its sights beyond the west after a successful US launch and the recent unveiling of its Facebook Open Graph integration, subscription music service Spotify has hired former Google executive Dan Brody as General Manager Asia-Pacific.
I’m hearing that Brody is currently in Australia talking to potential recruits, and Spotify itself has confirmed the GM position and that Brody is looking to hire people in Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney. Prior to Spotify, Brody was CEO at Koolanoo Group, Vice President of Business Development at Tudou, and a Strategic Partner of Development at Google China (and first employee apparently). He has lived in China for over 10 years.
Spotify is already available in the US, the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Finland but obviously has yet to set up shop anywhere in Asia — Spotify would not provide further details on a timeline for its Asian-Pacific launch.
This will be the fourth former high-level Googler hired by Spotify, the startup having recently picked up Teymour Farman-Farmaian for a business development role, Jeff Levick as head of ad sales and as of today Richard Gregory, who I’ve heard but not confirmed will be taking an executive position at Spotify US.
The Spotify team totals around 400 people and last time I checked in, it was looking to hire another 100 people to support its expansion plans. This number could only be increased by the success of the company’s Zynga-like social efforts — According to Inside Network’s App Data Spotify has gained 1 million new monthly active Facebook-integrated users since f8.
The one million new user number seems about right; An informal glance at my Facebook Ticker right now is telling me that a hell of a lot of you use Spotify.

Spotify Hides Your Musical Taste From Facebook Friends With Private Listening Mode

Spotify has rolled out an update to its app that will allow users to “hide” their listening behaviors from auto-publishing to Facebook.
Since launching its integration with Facebook last week, users of the service have complained about the fact that all of their listening activities are automatically published to Facebook.
The upside of this sort of integration is that you can share with friends what you’re listening to without friction. The downside is that your guilty pleasures are on display. You can disconnect the service from Facebook — but that means giving up the ability to play tracks while browsing friends’ Facebook pages.
Spotify updated its desktop app Thursday with a feature called “Private Listening.” It works like the “incognito” or “private browsing” in your web browser and keeps your Spotify activity off of Facebook as long as you are in that mode.

Spotify announced the feature on its Twitter account. To access the feature, update your Spotify client (it should happen automatically) and from the File (Windows) or Spotify (Mac) window, select “Private Listening.”
Spotify’s more controversial move — which limits new signups to users with a Facebook account — remains in effect. But hey, at least you can listen to Journey’s Greatest Hits on repeat without fear of online teasing.

Facebook TV Show Stars You & Your Friends

Warner Bros. will launch an experimental live-action show next month that will run exclusively on Facebook and incorporate information from your profile to put you and your friends into select scenes.
The show, called Aim High, is story of a young man who is a high school student by day and a government operative by night. McG, of Charlie’s Angels fame, will direct the series, which makes its debut on October 18 on Facebook and Cambio.com.
Claiming to be the first-ever “social series” by a Hollywood studio, Aim High will employ Facebook technology so that your photos, friends and other information in your profile shows up in the background scenes. It’s a feature that has been used by Mentos, and True Blood, among others. For example, in some scenes, your photo might appear in a student body election poster and your name might be scrawled in graffiti on the bathroom wall. Viewers can also share comments and tweets about the show.
While more networks are trying their hand at so-called transmedia storytelling, using Facebook as a test bed for new properties may be smart. But incorporating profile data could distract from the action more than it adds to it.
Would you watch a show on Facebook? Does the profile info angle interest you? Let us know in the comments

Facebook Timeline Will Be Huge for Brands

Zeny Huang is an Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York where she helps brands connect with fans in innovative and meaningful ways using social media. You can follow her on Twitter @Zenidala.
When Facebook unveiled Timeline last week, many users were struck by the idea of humanizing your profile by summarizing your life and connections.
But what if you’re not a human at all?

Timeline may have a similar effect on brands as well. In fact, the brand benefits of Timeline could be huge, and will let companies tell a more engaging and authentic story. This is one reason (beyond the 800 million active users) that brands should be celebrating the new changes to Facebook even if the network hasn’t yet confirmed that brand pages will employ Timeline. Here are a few more reasons we hope they do.

More Pictures, More Branding Opportunities

How Facebook Timeline Might Radically Change the Look of Brand Pages

PayPal & eBay Get Friendly With Facebook

Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.
Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. She will join a board of directors that includes founder Pierre Omidyar, Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Andreesen-Horowitz), Scott Cook (Intuit) and William Ford, Jr. (Ford Motor Company). Mitic was previously an SVP at Palm and a VP at Yahoo.
The appointment comes at an interesting time for eBay. In less than two weeks, the company will host its X.commerce Innovate Conference, an event where the company will unveil its vision for the future of ecommerce under the PayPal, eBay, Magento and GSI Commerce brands. Katie Mitic is already slated to be one of the conference’s keynote speakers. Both companies are expected to make a joint announcement at the conference.
We expect the announcement to be related to the Facebook Platform and the new Facebook Open Graph. Our bet is that Facebook Credits will be given the spotlight in a joint effort between the two companies. We’re digging to find out more about the partnership.
Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.

Facebook Users Beware: Facebook’s New Feature Could Embarrass You

September 29, 2011 Add Comment

If you didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcements last week — and of course the vast majority of Facebook users did not — you may be in for a surprise. Aside from the dramatically redesigned Facebook Timeline profile pages, which roll out in the coming weeks (and which I’ve grown to love), Facebook’s new system to auto-share what you do around the web may catch many Facebook addicts off guard.
In fact, even those people who know exactly how this new feature works may need to be on guard against sharing some seriously embarrassing updates.
For those not in the loop: Facebook is making sharing even easier by automatically sharing what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps. Instead of having to “Like” something to share it, you’ll just need to click “Add to Timeline” on any website or app, and that app will have permission to share your activity with your Facebook friends.
What activity, you ask? It could be the news articles you read online, the videos you watch, the photos you view, the music you listen to, or any other action within the site or app. Facebook calls this auto-sharing “Gestures.”
Can you see the possible issue here?
I’m pretty familiar with this auto-sharing function since it’s been a feature of The Huffington Post for a good while now. The way it works there: Once you join the site, every article you read is shared with your friends via an activity feed (unless you switch that feature off).
So right now I can see that someone I know professionally read “Scarlett Johansson Nude Photos” and a male colleague, who will remain anonymous, recently read the following:

1. “Conan O’Brien Stares At Nicole Scherzinger’s Cleavage”
2. “Heather Morris On Breast Implants”
3. “Perrey Reeves Shows Off Bikini Body (PHOTO)”

Now Facebook is bringing this functionality to every application out there.
I’m not saying this is a bad idea as such, but people need to be aware of what they’re signing up for when they add apps to the Timeline. Even my tech-savvy friends seem to set up these auto-share apps, completely forget about them, and return to doing things they wouldn’t necessarily want to share with all their friends.
Heck, I even find myself doing it.
Just a few days ago I added the Washington Post Social Reader app to my profile — this is one of many new news apps that auto-shares what you’re reading with your friends. Later, I returned to the app, forgot about that feature, read a ton of articles and realized they were all on my Facebook Timeline.
Now I didn’t read anything particularly saucy like my HuffPo friends did, but even that slight lapse was enough for me to uninstall the app completely.
So what can you do to avoid a Facebook privacy faux pas? Be aware that whenever you click a “Add to Timeline” button on a website or app from now on, you’re giving that app permission to post your activity to Facebook.
Most of the time you might be fine with this — like sharing the music you listen to on Spotify with friends (unless you like Rebecca Black) — but other times it might be worth disabling this function after you approve the app.

Also note that when you add an app to your Timeline, you get the option to share your activity with “Public,” “Friends” or “Custom.” By clicking “Custom,” you get the option to hide your activity from everyone but yourself

How Can Share Your Google+ Circles With Others

September 28, 2011 Add Comment

Google has rolled out a new feature for Google+ that lets users share the circles they’ve curated with their friends.
“Starting today, you can actually share your favorite circles with others,” Google+ engineer Owen Prater said on Google+. “So if you’ve got a great Photographers or Celebrities circle, for instance, then you can share a copy with your friends.”
A new “Share” link now appears when you hover over a circle on the Google+ Circles page. Clicking the link will let you add a comment and share that circle with your friends on Google+. The search giant is careful to point out that this only shares the members of the circle you’re sharing and not what you’ve named the circle. That will always remain private.
The young social network is on the rise ever since it opened itself up to the public. A recent report claims that Google+ now has 43 million users, an increase of 30% since dropping the invite barrier. Another report pegs Google+ as the eight largest social network in the world, just behind MySpace and LinkedIn.

Google+ Traffic Jumps 13-Fold After Opening to the Public

September 28, 2011 Add Comment

Opening up Google+ to the masses brought in a huge influx of new visits last week, finds Hitwise.

The researcher estimates the site received about 15 million U.S. visits for the week ending Sept. 24 vs. 1.1 million the previous week. The network’s 13-fold gain in visits came five days after it opened the site to the public. Research from Google+ watcher Paul Allen showed a 30% jump in users in two days and a base of 43 million users.
Google’s decision to open up Google+ came the same week that rival Facebook announced several bold changes to its site. The boost in visitors puts Google+ at number eight among most-visited social networking sites, right behind MySpace and up from number 54 the previous week.
Hitwise’s latest report is much more upbeat than one it issues in late August. At that point, the site’s growth and time on site appeared to have peaked in mid-July. Hitwise does not measure mobile traffic to the site.

Facebook Video Chat vs Google Hangouts

September 28, 2011 Add Comment

Facebook to Launch iPad App at Apple’s iPhone 5 Event

September 27, 2011 Add Comment

Facebook will launch its long-awaited iPad app at Apple’s iPhone 5 launch event on Oct. 4, In addition to the iPad app, Facebook is also expected to release a revamped version of its iPhone app and may unveil an HTML5-based mobile app marketplace.
The Facebook iPad app, which leaked earlier this year, has been in limbo at Facebook for the past few months. That much was made clear in a blog post Monday by former Facebook engineer Jeff Verkoeyen. In that post, he revealed that he left the company (for Google) partially because Facebook has been sitting on the completed app since May.
The problem, according to two sources familiar with the situation, has been a combination of timing and a strained relationship with Apple. It’s no secret that the two companies have been at odds over various issues during the past two years. For example, the social network pulled the plug on Facebook Connect in Ping because Apple didn’t give Facebook any warning about the feature, which would have eaten a great deal of bandwidth on Facebook’s side.
We’ve also heard rumors that Facebook was supposed to be integrated into iOS. This was meant to happen years ago, but disagreements on both sides eventually led to Apple integrating Twitter into iOS 5.
The relationship between the two technology giants is warming up, however, thanks to the shared goal of beating Google — and the simple fact that Facebook and Apple may need each other. The former doesn’t have a mobile platform while Apple doesn’t have a social platform. The culmination of this renewed friendship: the launch of Facebook for iPad at Apple’s iPhone 5 media event.
At this event, our sources also expect Facebook to unveil a new version of Facebook for the iPhone, with design and speed improvements that mimic the iPad app.
Facebook has also been working on a project to bring the Facebook Platform to mobile devices. The project, labeled “Project Spartan” by some (a name not used internally at Facebook, according to one of our sources), is designed to be a platform where developers can bring their Facebook apps to mobile devices via an HTML5 platform.
What we’re hearing is that Apple is actually working with Facebook on perfecting the HTML5 platform. This could also launch at Apple’s upcoming iPhone event, though our sources wouldn’t commit to a specific launch date for the platform. Facebook decided not to launch it at f8, as it didn’t want to water down the announcement of the new Facebook Open Graph and Timeline.
When we said last week that Facebook would be profoundly changed, we weren’t just referring to the new Facebook Open Graph and the “frictionless sharing” touted by Mark Zuckerberg. We were also talking about its secretive effort to become a mobile platform for the social web. And thanks to Apple, it looks like that effort is about to come to fruition.
We’ve reached out to Apple and Facebook for comment.

10 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Google

September 27, 2011 Add Comment

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” So began the “letter from the founders” penned by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the company’s securities registration form in 2004. Despite ever-increasing commercial success since that date, Brin and Page have kept to their word.

Google is an unconventional company with a huge stake in our online lives. It is a source of fascination for many, including us, but what really happens in the Googleplex? And what cool factoids and stats exist from the company’s relatively short past?
Here we bring you 10 fun facts about Google to quench our own thirst for Google knowledge as well as hopefully offer you a distracting diversion from your daily life.

Happy Birthday Google Making Sense of the Web for 13 Years

September 27, 2011 Add Comment

What were you up to 13 years ago? Maybe you were perfecting the ideal AIM screen name. Or you might have been surfing the “WestHollywood” neighborhood of GeoCities. Chances are, you had been using Yahoo! or AOL as your primary search engines. But Google’s debut on this day in 1998 would change the World Wide Web forever.

On September 4, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation as Google Inc. — they had received a $100,000 check from an investor made out to Google, Inc., and needed to incorporate that name so they could legally deposit the check.
Prior to the launch, Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and soon decided to launch a search service called BackRub in January 1996. They soon reevaluated the name (and the creepy logo) in favor of Google, a play on the mathematical figure, “googol,” which represents the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The name embodied their mission to create an infinite amount of web resources. And that they did.
Since then, Google has become a household name to billions of people worldwide. You’ll overhear senior citizens command their grandchildren to “google” the price of foot cream. You’ll witness toddlers punching the screen of the latest Android phone. And chances are, you’ve navigated the circles of Google+ (if not, let’s get you an invite already).

We’d like to guide you on a trip down Google lane, presenting the key products and acquisitions that were born in the first Google garage office, and innovated in the Googleplex. In the comments below, please share how Google has had an impact on your life, and join us in wishing Google a happy birthday!

Facebook’s New Features Might Not Be as Private as You Think

September 26, 2011 Add Comment

Apparently, Facebook has a lot of work to do on its privacy controls. In some cases, the new “frictionless sharing” features of Facebook can make it so that even when you’re logged out of Facebook, your browser is still tracking every page you visit, sending that data back to Facebook.

According to entrepreneur and self-described hacker Nik Cubrilovic, who shows the code involved with this alleged security issue on his website, “Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.”
Oddly enough, Cubrilovic says this data is not even hidden, adding that “You can test this for yourself using any browser with developer tools installed. It is all hidden in plain sight.”
SEE ALSO: Facebook Changes Again: Everything You Need To Know Cubrilovic’s interest was piqued after he read a post by Dave Winer on Scripting News, pointing out the specter of Facebook announcing the websites you’re visiting and articles you’re reading without your explicit permission or knowledge. Such capabilities are written into Facebook’s new API, according to Winer. He says that Facebook scares him, writing, “I think there’s a good chance that by visiting a site you are now giving them access to lots more info about you. I could be mistaken about this.”
Winer’s post was a reaction to one written last week by ReadWriteWeb, pointing out that the new “social reader” apps Facebook plans to launch soon (and are now available if you enable your Facebook Timeline) will be able to display what you’re reading to your Facebook friends. However, we logged into one of those Facebook apps, The Guardian Social Reader, and noticed that it’s easy to opt out of these “features” when we first began using it.
Even though you can opt out of much of this sneaky kind of sharing, we’re thinking Facebook still has some work to do before everyone can feel perfectly secure with its apps and sharing capabilities. Perhaps it’s a matter of educating users about Facebook’s new capabilities. Meanwhile, it might be time for us to modify that old saying, “Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t want to have read in court.” For the time being, must we change that to “Don’t click on any website that you wouldn’t want to have revealed in court?

Google Improves iOS App for Google+

September 26, 2011 Add Comment

Google is on a roll, not sitting idly by while Facebook has its moment in the media spotlight. After opening its Google+ social network to the public — gaining an additional 10 million users in its first two days — now the search giant follows Tuesday’s Android update of Google+ with a similar refresh to its iOS version, now available free on the App Store.
What’s new? Like its Android cousin, the iOS version of the Google+ mobile app now supports Hangouts, letting groups communicate with each other using front-facing cameras on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. In addition to Hangouts, the app offers better control of its various notifications, and a renamed Messenger (formerly Huddle) that now lets users attach photos to chat threads.
Other niceties include the ability to +1 in comments, improved +mention support, a map view in Profile for places you’ve lived, and various reliability improvements. Macstories‘ Federico Viticci had a chance to try out the new features in Hangouts — take a look at his experience here.

Facebook Changes in a Nutshell

September 26, 2011 Add Comment

facebook-changes-in-a-nutshell-27789-1316718340-9 (1)

Facebook’s profound changesoutlined last week, are leaving many users scrambling to catch up.
But, as the comic above points out, we’ve been through this before. Whatever the outcry this time, chances are things will settle down within a short time.
What do you think? Will we get used to the new Facebook in three weeks? Or has Mark Zuckerberg gone too far this time? Let us know in the comments.
Comic courtesy of Endless Origami

Turn Your Facebook Profile into a Mini Blog

A group of developers and designers have created a way for users to export their Facebook data — updates, photos, the works — and turn it into a themed mini-blog.
Talented Facebook designer Rob Goodlatte and a small crew of other Facebook designer/developers spent some time working with Facebook’s new Open Graph API at an internal company hackathon and created a few simple, functional themes and import options for a ton of your Facebook content. They call it Facebook.me, and it’s the answer to a lot of prayers for a more customized approach to Facebook data.
Here’s how it works: You connect the app to your Facebook account, then you allow the app to publish posts, comments, photos and other items. Your items are imported, then you can play around with the themes to get the look and feel you like best. Right now, three themes are available: The very Web-2.0 Rush, the magazine-like Photostream and the visually rich Glide. Check them out below.
Goodlatte also demonstrated the app for us at f8, the Facebook developer conference — we’ve embedded the vid at the bottom of this post.
What do you think? Should Facebook make this nifty tool an official feature of the site? Would you like to see (and use) more apps like this that are built on the Open Graph API?

Google +1 Button Now Shares Directly to Google+

Google has upgraded the +1 button with several new features, including the ability to directly share a webpage to Google+.
“Beginning today, we’re making it easy for Google+ users to share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button,” Google SVP of Social Vic Gundotra announced in a blog post. “Just +1 a page as usual and look for the new ‘Share on Google+’ option. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share.”
In the past, clicking the +1 button only shared content to a tab on a user’s Google+ profile. This is in contrast to the Facebook Like button, which posts an article on a user’s Facebook wall. Now that Google has its own social network, the search giant can match Facebook’s button functionality.
Google also announced the addition of +snippets to the +1 button. A +snippet is simply the link, image and description automatically generated when a link is shared on Google+. These +snippets make content more engaging on the Google+ social network, which is why the search giant is giving publishers the ability to customize their snippets. Publishers can customize the code of their +1 button to tweak what gets displayed in a +snippet.
Google says the +1 button has been growing rapidly since its introduction in June. The button is now embedded on more than 1 million websites, garnering a total of 4 billion daily views. Those are impressive numbers, but the success or failure of the +1 button will be measured in clicks, not views.

Facebook Keynote at f8 Pits Zuckerberg vs. Zuckerberg [VIDEO]

Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stand up? Wait a minute — that’s Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg standing in for the Facebook CEO at the f8 keynote, all in good fun.
Our favorite moment’s at 5:00: Samberg’s “new” Facebook feature for “I’m not really friends with these people.”

Integrate Google+ Into Your WordPress Site

This month’s hot topic has been, without a doubt, Google+. Whether the new social service from the world’s largest search company will be a “Facebook killer” remains to be seen, but one thing’s for certain: This is one social network you don’t want to ignore.
When it comes to getting found, Google+ is fast becoming a great asset for bloggers and content producers thanks to its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools. In this post, we’ll show you a few ways to start spreading a little of that Google+ love on your WordPress-powered website.

Display Your Google+ Profile Information

Software developer John Henson from PlusDevs has developed a handy, easy to use WordPress widget that displays your Google+ profile on your blog. The setup is quick and simple: Install the plug-in and drag the widget into your sidebar. Just fill out the form and you’re done.
You can also incorporate the widget into your template with only a few lines of PHP code, giving you the flexibility to place it anywhere within your layout.
You can learn more about the widget in the official blog post or jump straight to the code on GitHub.
Unofficial Google+ user tracking site SocialStatistics.com also offers an embeddable Google+ widget. Simply add your

Facebook Changes Again Everything You Need To Know

As we predicted, Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the f8 conference in San Francisco Thursday introduced some of the most profound changes seen on Facebook since its inception. So many changes, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track. So here’s a handy-dandy guide.
1. You’re going to get a Timeline — a scrapbook of your life. In a complete overhaul of its ever-evolving profile page, Facebook is introducing Timeline. This is a stream of information about you — the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates, the apps you’ve used, even the places you’ve visited on a world map — that scrolls all the way back to your birth. It encourages you to post more stuff about your past, such as baby pictures, using Facebook as a scrapbook.
The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you’re only seeing the most interesting parts of your history. You can customize this by clicking on a star next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.
Timeline is in beta now, and will be opt-in to start. In the long run, it will become the new default profile page.
2. You don’t have to just Like something — now you can [verb] any [noun]. Remember when all you could do to something on Facebook — a video, a comment, a product, a person — was Like it? Pretty soon that’s going to seem laughably antiquated. The social network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button.
So you’ll start seeing the option to tell the world you’re Reading a particular book, for example, or Watching a given movie, or Listening to a certain tune. In turn, as many observers have pointed out, this is likely to lead to an explosion of oversharing — and far more information on your friends’ activities showing up in your news feed than you probably cared to know.
3. Facebook apps need only ask permission once to share stories on your behalf. Although not as big a deal as the Timeline, this tweak may be one of the more controversial. Previously, apps had to ask every time they shared information about you in your profile. Now, the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you. If you’re cool with that, the app never has to ask you again.
But you don’t have to worry about this app stuff clogging your news feed, because …
4. All “lightweight” information is going to the Ticker. Status updates, photos from a wedding or a vacation, changes in relationship status: these are the kinds of things you want to see from your friends when you look at your news feed. Who killed whom in Mafia Wars? Who planted what in FarmVille? Not so much. So that kind of trivial detail has been banished to the Ticker, a real-time list of things your friends are posting now that scrolls down the side of your screen.
5. You can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook. Starting today, thanks to a whole bunch of partnerships, there are a lot more things you can do without ever having to leave Facebook. You can watch a show on Hulu, listen to a song on Spotify, or check out a story on Yahoo News The ticker will tell you what your friends are watching, listening to or reading, allowing you to share the experience with them by clicking on a link.
The upshot: a brand-new kind of media-based peer pressure. On stage, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — a launch partner — revealed that he had only just decided to watch Breaking Bad because Facebook’s Ticker told him a colleague was watching it. Netflix’s own algorithm had been recommending the show to him for years, but that was never reason enough for Hastings.
6. Facebook has more users and more engagement than ever. We got two interesting nuggets of information out of Zuckerberg (and the Zuckerberg-impersonating Andy Samberg): Facebook has hit 800 million users, and most of them are active. The social network just saw a new record for the most visitors in one day: an eye-popping 500 million.
Indeed, the whole impression left by the event was that of a confident, fast-evolving company that is becoming ever more professional, and Zuckerberg’s stage show bore more than a little resemblance to an Apple keynote. It’s going to be interesting to see what Google+ can do to keep up.

NASA: 6.5-Ton Satellite Falling to Earth Friday or Saturday

NASA‘s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is headed towards Earth. But don’t fear, it’s still unlikely anyone will be hit.
The space agency now says the U.S. is back as a possible “landing site” for the satellite. As it gets closer to impact, NASA now says the 6.5-ton behemoth will fall to earth sometime Friday or Saturday ET.
“The satellite orientation or configuration apparently has changed, and that is now slowing its descent,” NASA says, explaining why the space agency’s prediction the satellite would fall to Earth Wednesday has been revised, and why the U.S. is now back in the running as a possible, albeit unlikely target.
The agency still can’t pinpoint exactly when the spacecraft will reenter the atmosphere, writing on its website, “It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any certainty, but predictions will become more refined in the next 12 to 18 hours.”
Should we be afraid? In a word, no. Even though NASA says about a half a ton’s worth of spacecraft pieces — that’s about 26 hunks of space junk — will fall to earth, it says most (if not all) of the debris will probably land in an ocean. If you want to know the odds of your own survival, Orbital Debris and Meteoroid Consultant Don Kessler calculated the chances of any one person being hit by any of that debris is less than one in 10 trillion.
But that’s not stopping people from creating some humorous tweets:

Google+ Updates via SMS

September 22, 2011 1 Comment

How to enable?

It is simple.Just go to your Google+ Settings page.In the Set delivery preferences Click on Add phone number.In The country,Select India.Input your mobile number and click Send verification code.

Once you verify your number with your Google+ account, your public profile will be linked to your Mobile number.You can also choose what kind of notifications you want through SMS in the same page.

Once you activate your mobile number on google+, You will receive notifications.

Google+ Now Lets You Search for People & Topics

September 22, 2011 Add Comment

One of the weak points of Google+ so far has been, ironically enough, its search. Searches for specific people often went nowhere, and forget about searching topics.
On Tuesday, however, Google introduced expanded search capability that finds people and topics. For instance, if you search “motorcycles,” you’ll get posts from Google+ on the topic, and “Scrabble” will yield recipes and such from other users. (See pictures below.)
“Google+ search results include items that only you can see, so family updates are just as easy to find as international news,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post.
SEE ALSO: GOOGLE+: THE COMPLETE GUIDE
Gundotra also revealed that 1 billion items are shared on the network every day.

Klout Adds Google+ To Its Social Scores

September 22, 2011 Add Comment

The third social network icon on your Klout dashboard is now Google+, just behind the Twitter and Facebook buttons. Latching onto news Tuesday that anyone can sign up for Google+, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez revealed the Google+ integration via a tweet: “Boom! I just connected my @klout account with Google+.”
Fernandez told it will take a few days for Klout — which calculates users’ social influence and assigns a score from 0 to 100 — to pull in everyone’s data and “normalize it across the population.”
“We have always believed that influence was the ability to drive people to actions and Google+ has great signals such as +1s and comments,” Fernandez continued. “One thing we have noticed is that the conversation frequency and quality on Google+ really sets it apart from other platforms.”
Fernandez has always been open about his desire to add Google+. He and his team were just waiting for Google to release the platform’s first developer application programming interfaces. Google made that Google+ API available last week.
In August, Klout doubled the number of services it measures, adding Blogger, Flickr, Instagram, Last.fm and Tumblr to its scoring system. With the addition of Google+, Klout users can connect to 11 services. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and YouTube are the others.

Not Google+: The First Antisocial Network [PARODY VIDEO]

Do you feel like there’s simply too many social networks you have to manage? You aren’t alone.
On the heels of Google opening Google+ to the public, the people over at College Humor decided to create their own social network: Not Google+.
Joining Not Google+ is simple: “Don’t join Google+.” The next step is simple as well. “Once you’ve done that, don’t invite your friends to join Google+.”
While College Humor picks on Google for the entire two minute video, it does make a good point: do we really need another social network?
Google seems to think so. College Humor thinks you should play tetherball with a small Portuguese child instead. Let us know what you think of the phenomenon of social networking overload in the comments.

Google+ vs. Facebook: The Gloves Are Off

What a day. In the space of a few short hours, Google+ wrenched open the floodgates, allowing anyone to sign up for the fledgling social network — while Facebook retooled its newsfeed so you won’t miss any of your friend’s vital updates.
Google+ managed to out-announce Facebook by a wide margin. The search giant offered a slew of new Google+ features, such as turning Hangouts into a bona fide broadcast platform. The search giant even added–you guessed it–search to the service.
For those of you not in Google+, which is most of you, this is a very big deal. Google+ has, by some measures, almost 20 million users and no way of finding anything. I have no idea why Google waited to introduce search until Google+ was out of the hands of Google’s more trusted Web cognoscenti’ audience. We could have debugged it for them. The company also managed to bury the lead, putting the fact that registration for Google+ is now open to the masses near the end of its announcement.
Facebook took one look at what Google was doing with the only social network that can really challenge it, and jumped. It announced changes to the Newsfeed that might have waited until the start of the F8 Facebook Developers conference, which begins this Thursday.
As I’ve said before, Facebook’s lead in the social space is beyond substantial — but clearly the company feels the heat. Google+’s wealth of announcements and features makes it, I think, instantly competitive with Facebook. Even so, Google+ is so rich that it could overwhelm typical Facebook users who want to confine their usage patterns to the Facebook tools they know and love.
Google’s Hangouts, for instance, is pretty much a stand-alone application. Look at all the things you can do with it:

Hold hangouts via Android smartphone
Share your screen
Draw together
Create and edit documents together
Hold topic-based hangouts
Run your own TV network

Google Plus : The Complete Guide

Already using Google+? Follow Gplus forum for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as social media and technology updates.

Google+: It’s the hot social network on the block. In just three weeks, Google’s competitor to Facebook and Twitter has amassed more than 10 million users, and its users are sharing more than 1 billion pieces of content daily. It’s become a hotbed for early adopters, tech luminaries, marketers and businesses around the world.
Google+ isn’t the easiest thing to understand, though. It has a lot of features that can confuse beginners. Even advanced users can miss a lot of the little gems and nuances that define Google+.
That’s why we decided to dig into every aspect of Google+, from Hangouts to Circles, from Google+ for businesses to what’s next for Google’s social network. The result is an extensive guide on all of Google+’s key features, as well as an introduction to the service and the important things you need to know about it. We’ve included commentary, videos, photos and more in our in-depth guide. In addition, we will update this guide regularly with the newest information on Google’s Facebook competitor.
So, without further ado, here is complete guide to Google+:
Guide updated July 28, 2011

What Is Google+?

Google+ is the search giant’s latest attempt to create a social network that rivals Facebook. Google launched Google+ on June 28, 2011 with a private beta. The project was led by Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of social.
The social network is a collection of different social products. These features include Stream (a newsfeed), Sparks (a recommendation engine), Hangouts (a video chat service), Huddle (a group texting service), Circles (a friend management service) and Photos. We explain all of these features later in this guide. More features such as Games and Questions are expected to launch in the near future.
Google chose the name Google+ because it wants Google+ to be “an extension of Google itself,” Gundotra explained to Mashable days before the launch. It’s designed to be an improvement to all of Google, which is why the company also decided to change the iconic Google navigation bar to include a link to a user’s Google+ profile, as well as a new icon that displays how many notifications a user has received, much like how Facebook handles notifications.
This isn’t Google’s first shot at dominating the social space. It has a long history in social media, including Orkut and its biggest success in social, YouTube. However, it’s had two very big flops in social: Google Wave and Google Buzz.

Screenshots: What Google+ Looks Like

Google+ Now Open to Everyone

After being invite-only for nearly three months, Google+ is opening up to everyone.
Writing on its official company blog about the 99 improvements that have been made to the product since launching, Google’s Vic Gundotra wrote, “We’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups.”
Today’s update also comes with big improvements to Google+ Hangouts, including the ability to use them on Android devices (version 2.3 and higher). It also includes search, which is a hybrid of content shared on Google+ and results from around the web. “Just type what you’re looking for into the Google+ search box, and we’ll return relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web,” Gundotra wrote.

Google+ invites were in high demand when the service first launched in July, and the service attracted 20 million visitors in its first month. Since then, however, the service seems to have lost some of its luster, with a controversy around brand pages fanning the flames.
Facebook has also launched a number of features that challenge what were initially selling points of Google’s offering. The leading social network revamped Friend Lists and made changes to the News Feed, both of which bring Google+ Circles-like functionality to the site.
Now that Google+ is open to everyone, we’ll see if the service can regain the momentum it had earlier this summer.

Google wallet review

How It Works:

Back in May, Google announced their mission to kill your wallet.
Tying into the near field communication (NFC) system built into select Android handsets, Google Wallet allows your phone to act as your credit card. By tapping your Android phone against a compatible card reader available in select retailers, your payment credentials are transferred to the merchant without any swiping or physical cards required.
While the idea of combining your phone and your credit cards may terrify some, Google Wallet is (at least in theory) more secure than their real world plastic counterparts. If your phone’s screen is off, the transmitter chip can not be powered and stores no data (thereby preventing a passing hacker from skimming your card as he walks by). If you haven’t used Wallet in the past 30 minutes or so (or if you’ve manually locked it), a PIN is required before anyone can use your cards or even see which cards your Wallet contains.

My Experiences:

“What? Wait, do that again.”
“Is that legal?”
“Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaa.”
Every time I use Google Wallet, the person on the other side of the register looks at me like I’m Marty McFly and I’ve just stepped out of the DeLorean, hoverboard in hand. More than once, as I touched on above, they wondered aloud if I’d just pulled some techno voodoo on their system (though my favorite reaction of all was easily “Oh my god! iPhone 5!”)
When Wallet works (as it did for nearly all of the transactions I tried at compatible NFC readers), it works really, really well. It’s lightning fast, ultra-intuitive (turn on display, tap phone to reader. If you haven’t punched in your PIN recently, do so and tap the phone again. You don’t ever need to launch the app manually.) The merchant simply sees it run through their point of sales machine as any other card might, the receipt prints out, and you’re on your way.
When it doesn’t work, things get a bit… awkward. The one time the system failed, the merchant legitimately had no means of figuring out why. My phone’s screen read “Sent!”, their card reader made all of the appropriate bloops, and then.. nothing. I tried an NFC-enabled AmEx card I had handy, and it worked without a hitch. This was a location that I’d used Wallet at before. These same mystery issues can pop up with any credit card payments system, of course — but with the newness of NFC and that air of caution that a few folks conveyed, you should probably be prepped to explain yourself.

Where It Works:

Google Wallet will not work everywhere your credit card will. It won’t work everywhere there’s an NFC-friendly card reader, either. Wallet requires an NFC reader based on a new-ish specification, and only a select bunch of retailers have gotten around to updating.
With that said: even out in the relatively low-tech East Bay of California, I had no trouble finding locations to at least test things out. Making that effort considerably easier was an included MasterCard PayPass application, which can find and display all compatible retailers near your current location or any location you manually input. The list of compatible retailers within a 5-mile radius of my home was about a dozen items long, almost entirely made up of Jack In The Boxes, CVSes, and 7-11s.
Therein lays one of Google’s biggest challenges: getting these card readers everywhere. The readers are by no means Google Wallet specific (as mentioned above, the reader just needs to be based on a relatively new spec, but is the same tap-to-pay reader already used by Visa/AmEx/Mastercard) and the card vendors themselves have long been making the push — but until these things are nearly ubiquitous, your wallet (or at least one physical credit card you keep at arm’s reach) isn’t going anywhere.

How You Pay:

On Day 1, Wallet supports just one third-party card: the Citi Mastercard.
I don’t have one of those, and had a hard time finding anyone who does.
Fortunately, Google is well aware of this. For those of us with other banks and other cards, they’ve created the Google Pre-paid card. You add funds to the pre-paid card from any other credit card you’ve got, then tap into this pre-paid pool whenever you make a purchase. It’s not the most convenient extra step, but it at least opens up Wallet to just about anyone with a credit card. Google has just announced that they plan to support Visa, Discover, and AmEx cards in future releases — alas, no timeframe was given and it’s not clear whether or not support will be rolled out on a bank-by-bank basis.

The App

The Google Wallet app is executed with near perfection. It’s gorgeous, thoughtfully designed, and perfectly intuitive. The app is made up of four sections: Payment Cards, Loyalty Cards, My Offers, and History.
Payment Cards displays all of your Wallet-ified credit cards in a horizontally scrolling carousel. A small toggle below each card allows you to set anything in your e-plastic armory as the default. You can also add retailer-specific giftcards to your collection, though the only retailer supported at launch is American Eagle (Google promises more are on the way. I believe Subway is on board for the future.)
Loyalty Cards looks nearly identical to Payment Cards, but is meant for your myriad “Buy 10 sandwiches, get one free!”-type cards. As with giftcards, though, the only retailer at launch is American Eagle (but again, more are said to be on the way.)
My Offers lets you view any nearby promos you’ve purchased through Google’s daily/local deals app, Google Shopper.
The History section is a bit bare bones on day 1. It can currently display only the timestamps of your recent transactions , leaving out any details regarding where it was used and even how much was spent. Google tells me this is something they plan to address quickly, but they just couldn’t get it done in time for launch.

Conclusion:

Google Wallet is great, magical, impressive, and all sorts of other positive adjectives. But today’s launch is just a small, but meaningful, first step. NFC-based payments via Mobile is something the world has long unanimously agreed would be awesome, but nearly all of the progress toward it (at least in the US) has been behind the scenes. This is the first time the public has really gotten to play with it — and while it’s going to take a few years (at the very least. Think about how many shops still insist on “Cash Only”.) before it’s ubiquitous enough to kill your wallet, Google seems in it for the long haul.
(… now, can anyone tell me what the heck I’m supposed to do when the battery dies and I’ve left my wallet at home?)

Google Wallet Likely Launching Today

Last week, Google posted an awesome teaser video for Google Wallet featuring George Costanza. The implication: Google Wallet would finally be launching soon. Now we think we know when: tomorrow.
As you can see in the above image, documentation is being sent around to partners stating a September 19 launch day. We’ve heard from others that this is accurate. And it also lines up nicely with NFC World Congress, which kicks off tomorrow in the French Riviera. Google is not listed as a speaker or exhibitor at the event, but their main partner MasterCard is the official sponsor.
Back in May when Google Wallet and Offers were initially unveiled, Google stated that field trials for Wallet would beging immediately and that an official launch would come this summer. Initial reports pointed towards a September 1 launch. Technically, summer lasts until September 22, so it looks like Google will hit their deadline with a few days to spare.
While this will be the official launch, the product itself will likely still be quite limited. The only officially compatible phone is the Nexus S 4G, which is only available on Sprint in the U.S. Google has an NFC sticker product to bring tap-and-pay to other phones, but it’s not clear if that will be ready at launch or not. Hardware to enable the payments on the merchant end is also needed. And again, MasterCard has been the only official partner on the credit card side of things so far. Perhaps Google will have more to say on that tomorrow. But the above documentation still points to PayPass-enabled Citi MasterCards as the only way to use the service for now.
It also makes sense for Google to get Wallet out there now before their next flagship Android phone, the Nexus Prime, launches next month. It too will have NFC capabilities built in and will bring the Wallet functionality to the much larger Verizon customer base.

Facebook To Launch Read, Listened, Watched, And Want Buttons

The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.
It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook) but from what we hear, Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, “Want” as well.
And it’s unclear what will happen to the Like button and how these new buttons will affect the Like button. And we don’t know what Facebook will do with this data, but there is so much the network could do with the data from these buttons. It seems pretty obvious that ad targeting would be a huge opportunity as well as the capability of delivering a more personalized experience for users. Not to mention that brands, retailers, entertainment companies and other businesses will be able to gain segmented data around the Like.
If all of this is starting to sound a bit like Facebook’s infamous Beacon project, it shouldn’t be too surprising — from what we’ve heard a key part of these new Facebook features is to provide Beacon-like functionality in terms of auto-populating News Feed stories based around intent and actions. But they’ll do so without the advertising and privacy ramifications. At least for now…
The introduction of these new, granular buttons would certainly add more depth to content surfaced by media sharing apps as well as from retailers, which is in line with previous reports of what’s being launched. We’ll keep you updated on what else we hear is in the pipeline for f8 (and we know what’s not being announced: Project Spartan).
Update: Liz Gannes is reporting that the motto for f8 will be “Read. Watch. Listen.” — that sounds exactly in line with the buttons we’ve heard about.

Facebook’s Spartans Ready For Battle, But War Won’t Come At f8