Happy Birthday, Steve Jobs: A Look Back at the Man Who Changed Tech

Today would have been the 57th birthday of Apple co-founder and visionary Steve Jobs, who died on Oct. 5, 2011, after a long battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Social media users have been extremely active in wishing the late media mogul a happy birthday, and "Happy Birthday Steve Jobs" is currently trending worldwide on Twitter. A tweet from the official General Electric account this morning read, "Happy Birthday Steve Jobs. Innovation wouldn't be the same without you."
Another popular tweet from numerous users read, "3 Apples changed the world: Adam and Eve's forbidden apple, Newton's apple and finally Steve Jobs's Apple. Happy Birthday Steve Jobs."

There Is One Thing Missing From Google’s +1 [OPINION]

The search giant’s social media initiative, well covered by this outlet, represents a big change in thinking. The concept, revolutionary enough, is that instead of trusting a search engine’s algorithm to deliver the most relevant search results, one should trust their friends’ preferences, along with the preferences of all other searchers.

Both concepts are viable today. Generally speaking, Internet users are well accustomed to receiving recommendations from friends, solicited and unsolicited, and then acting on them. We are also largely comfortable trusting the feedback of strangers, whether they tell us a book on Amazon is worth reading, a hotel on TripAdvisor is clean, or a restaurant on Yelp has the best lobster frittata you’ve ever tasted.

A big selling point of sites like Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp is the input of millions of consumers. If those sites relied solely on algorithmically generated recommendations without consumer input, they might not be nearly as successful. Yet with search, we are so dependent on the algorithm. Search is so complicated that an algorithm better know what’s more relevant, or all hope is lost. Why trust our friends and strangers when we can trust the masterwork of the world’s best engineers slaving away for over a decade?

With +1, Google told us to change. This process of change has three significant challenges:

• We must notice that the results are different. After a decade of habitually scanning headlines and brief textual synopses, it’s hard to notice anything else.
• We must act on a +1 listing, which then brings up some information about Google Profiles and a whole new system that for many will be an added hindrance. The beauty of search to date has been its simplicity for the users – enter a query and click a result, ad infinitum.
• We must notice the +1 votes from peers and others, realize that these are different, and act on them accordingly.

Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Google+ stats trackers: Three quarters (or more) of Google+ users are male.

SocialStatistics, a third-party site that gathers data from select profiles, pegs the percentage of male users at 86.8%, whileFindPeopleOnPlus, which curates information from about a million users, says men constitute 73.7% of Google+.

FindPeopleOnPlus also discovered that 95% of the Google+ users who say they are “looking for love” on the site are male. Some 25,000 users in their sample identify themselves as single, versus 19,000 married and 12,000 in a relationship. The vast majority of the million users sampled don’t say what they are.

With around 60% of users identifying themselves as web developers or software engineers, that paints a fairly stereotypical picture of Google+’s userbase: nerdy guys who have deep understandings of technology and who don’t mind killing some time setting up Circles of friends.

It’s true that the early adopters of any new technology are usually male. But Google+ will have to appeal to a mainstream audience if it’s to reach mass adoption anytime soon. Consider the gender breakdown for Google+’s biggest competitor, Facebook. The social network is close to a 50-50 split between men and women. And some of Facebook’s most addicted, most enthusiastic users are women.

Meanwhile, Google is about to stop requiring users to input their gender — meaning we may get less accurate stats as time progresses.

Google+ : Already 10 million people join Google plus with invite

Google+, the Web search engine behemoth’s Facebook rival social networking site gets 10 million users in its first two weeks, says Larry Page, the CEO of Google. Indeed, 10 million may be nothing in front of Facebook’s 750 million users. But the rate of growth is much higher on the still-in-beta Google Plus.

Google launched its Plus social network site two weeks back with a number of incredible features. Sign-up to the limited trail version of the social media site is invite-only now. One can join the site only if an already-joined friend invites him/her.

“Growth on Google has been great,” the newly-appointed CEO and co-founder of Google said. “Over 10 million have joined. That's a great achievement for the team. There has been a ton of activity.”

According to Page, there are more than 1 billion status updates and 2.3 billion +1s on Google+ a day. +1 is Google+’s replay to Facebook’s famous ‘like’ button. At a whole, Google Plus has intensified the battle with Facebook.

The new CEO of Google is to restructure the company like a start-up. More products are launched and many less-effective products are closed during the last quarter, in which the company posted an income of $2.5 billion, up 36 % from Q2 of 2010.

“Today, I see more opportunities for Google than ever before; we're just at the beginning of what we want to do,” the energetic Page say. “We're only at 1 percent of what's possible. Google is just getting started.”