Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’, Lets You Share With Unlimited Users

Today, in the buildup to its f8 conference, Facebook is rolling out another key new feature: a one-way follow model called Subscriptions. It’s sort of like Twitter, sort of like Google+, and it massages one of the service’s biggest pain points for users who have a lot of friends (or who want to share their status updates broadly).

Here’s how it works. As you browse around the site, you’ll notice that some users have a button at the top of their profile that says ‘Subscribe’. Click it, and you’ll start seeing that user’s status updates in your News Feed, just as if you were their Facebook friend. But there’s a big difference: unlike normal Facebook friends, the people you subscribe to don’t have to approve your subscription request, and there’s no limit on how many people can subscribe to any given user.

(more…)

Share

Google has added a feature that allows users to share directions, hotel information and other content from Google Maps to its social network, Google+.

Specifically, Google has added support for +snippets in Maps. +Snippets, which rolled out in August, adds a link, description and thumbnail to whatever webpage you want to share to Google+. When you click on the “Share” button on the black Google+ bar, the share will be populated with a description and image.

(more…)

Share

Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.

Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.

Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).

(more…)

Share

If communication barriers on Google+ got you down, never fear. Google has released a tool to ensure that updates from its international user base can be easily translated.

Google Translate for Google+, released Monday, is a simple browser extension for Chrome that translates posts and comments into more than 50 languages.

(more…)

Share

Google+ Posts Now Appear in Google Search Results

Google has begun integrating Google+ into search results with public Google+ posts now appearing in Social Search. Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. For example, if I share a Mashable article about Google+ eliminating pseudonyms publicly on my Google+ page, users who have added me to their circles will see a note that I shared that link if they stumble upon it in Google Search.

(more…)

Share

Google+ users may notice something new on top of their streams on Thursday — a small icon signifying that Google+ Games had gone live.

The social network began offering a range of games from publishers including Zynga, Rovio and Wooga, but minutes after Google announced the offering on its Official Blog, it disappeared. It’s likely to return very soon though. “Games will be gradually rolling out so you might not see it right away,” a Google rep says.

(more…)

Share

Google Plus has yet to launch pages for brands, but that hasn’t stopped people from making comparisons with the live version on Facebook, and now so will we. JWT New York emerging media strategist Zeny Huang penned one for Mashable, focusing on brand pages, and we beg to differ.

Huang zeroed in on four topics in comparing brand pages on the two social networks: search, customization, analytics, and the fact that Google can learn from Facebook. Again, Google Plus is still in beta, and brand pages don’t exist yet, nor do some of the hypothetical features she mentioned.

(more…)

Share

New Google+ Extension Adds Real-Time Code Collaboration to Hangout

The developer who previously brought us the Facebook Friend Exporter, Mohamed Mansour, has created a new, experimental Google Chrome extension which adds text-based document collaboration capabilities to Google+ Hangouts. For those of you not yet versed in all the G+ terminology, Hangouts are the multi-person video chat feature in Google’s social networking service, supporting up to 10 people at a time.

With this new Hangout extension, now you can do more than simply chat – you can collaborate on text-based files, too. Mansour suggests this would be a great extension for developers to use for code collaboration, for example.

(more…)

Share

Google+ Could Have More Users Than Twitter & LinkedIn in a Year

Google+ has signed up 13% of U.S. adults so far and could hit 22%, in a year, passing Twitter and LinkedIn as the number two social media network, according to a new study.

The report, based on a Bloomberg and YouGov poll of 1,003 U.S. adults from July 29 to August 2, revealed that 71% percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, but that number will drop to 69% a year from now. Among people who use both services, 30% say they plan to cut the time they spend on Facebook. However, 31% of Google+ users say they’ve abandoned their Google+ accounts or never posted anything on them.

(more…)

Share

Power Google+ users — those with lots of Circles — are intimately aware of how frustrating it can be to manage them. Your most-used Circles can get hidden at the bottom of a long list. But Google+ engineer Brett van Zuiden now comes to the rescue with some welcome Friday afternoon news: You can now reorder your circles.

“We’ve been hearing that you want a way to reorder your circles — so when you add people, view your stream, or share, that list of circles is in the order that works for you,” van Zuiden writes on Google’s thriving social network. “We thought it was a great idea, and today, we’re launching this on Google+.”

(more…)

Share