RT @MacObserver: Google+ Update Adds Emulated iPad Support http://tmo.to/eh9U #iOS

Circles Fatigue: The Dark Side Of Google+ http://feedly.com/k/r7iksC <- he’s doing it wrong. You don’t need so many circles.

Google+ needs to provide a way to tag multiple posts for muting. It’s starting to take a long time to mute individual posts.

Excellent #GooglePlus introduction for new users. http://t.co/MZ0NbHL

Testing Google+ to Facebook and Twitter update.

This is the best Chrome extension for #GooglePlus that I’ve come across. http://t.co/Hj8AYMy

How Does Google Make the Big Bucks? http://t.co/EJl7EAu

Getty Images Says Google Plus Terms of Service is “OK” http://feedly.com/k/n0DGhy #photo

Sharing Instagram photos on Google+ automatically http://t.co/7aKNG3V <- pretty complex. Ideally @instagram please add G+ sharing

While waiting for the native iOS Google+ apps to be approved, I was searching for a way to get the full Google+ desktop experience on the iPad. The cut down mobile web version was too light weight for me and I really didn’t want to lug my laptop around the house, just to stay plugged into Google+.  The free (and awesome) alternative web browser for the iPad – Terra – is the near perfect solution (see update below).  Terra has a setting that allows you to designate the “run as” browser identity. Setting this to “Mac OS X Safari” or if you prefer, one of the variants of Internet Explorer solves the problem.  The entire Google+ desktop version is rendered perfectly.  This makes the wait for the iOS apps far less painful.

UPDATE : It seems that this is not the complete solution. For some reason, Terra doesn’t render the text entry sections of Google+ plus properly. So you can browse the site just fine, but you can’t comment or respond. Bummer !

Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Here are some early thoughts having been using Google+ for the last few days. This is Google’s biggest foray into the social networking scene thus far (not including specialised sites like Youtube). Interestingly, most people have commented that Facebook is Google’s target with Google+. In my view, Google+ is mounting at least a two front war against the two biggest social media gorillas at the moment – Facebook and Twitter. Leaving aside LinkedIn, which is another niche social network, even though it has just moved into second place in the US.

Facebook is primarily aimed at allowing users to share content with an exclusive and private social network. Two people have to agree to be joined before content can be shared. Twitter on the other hand, is the opposite. It allows users to broadcast to all comers. Both services have served their core markets extremely well. Google+ strides both these markets through the very elegantly designed “circles” approach to content specific audience management.  Google+ has adopted Twitter’s approach in allowing anybody to “follow” anybody else in the network (unlike Facebook) but it allows the publisher to determine if a specific content should be shared with all (ie. Twitter) or to a specific group (ie. Facebook).  It removes the “friending” mechanism that Facebook uses which introduces friction in the scaling of the social network (not that it has slowed Facebook by much).

I really like the Google+ approach to audience management. Managing two different networks (private and public) is unnecessary if the same service can elegantly allow me to parcel out the content to the appropriate group whenever I publish. With this in mind, I think in the short term, Google+ is a bigger threat to Twitter than to Facebook – contrary to many opinions which seem to think Facebook is all of a sudden a dinosaur at risk of extinction. There are several reasons why I think so. Firstly, the demographic of the Twitter user. The same people who have gravitated to Twitter will easily move to Google+ as they are very familiar with the process of building the network in the new platform. If you look at the most popular Google+ users currently, they are also the most popular Twitter users. Their networks have already joined them in the new service.

Secondly, it’s not that easy to de-throne Facebook as it has a huge first mover’s advantage and the folks on Facebook may find Google+’s interface to be too daunting or complex to use. A common feedback that I’ve heard from my friends who have joined Google+ from Facebook this week is, what do I do now that I’ve joined.  Obviously, this is early days in Google+’s evolution but despite the advances of Google+’s capabilities, its interface is a bit cryptic to casual users.

Thirdly, and most critically, Facebook’s network effect (or its social graph) is very strong such that unless a large chunk of your Facebook friends move to Google+ as well, most Facebook users will not be inclined to use Google+.  Additionally, Facebook users have cultivated a treasure trove of private memories and social interactions in Facebook that they will be reluctant to abandon with a move to Google+.  Google clearly wants to target Facebook’s users as they have already built a large social set of capabilities in both the web and the mobile product. But they have to do a lot more to get traction with users who are entrenched with Facebook and the information they have already amassed there.

This takes me back to my original point. Users on Twitter have been sharing bite sized pieces of information which can be archived there for posterity but there’s nothing overly personal in nature that they’ve shared there (at least I haven’t ..) that would stop them from moving to a new platform. The barrier to entry to Twitter’s userbase is far lower than Facebook’s.  One aspect that may delay the migration of Twitter users is that Google+ doesn’t have the same 140 character limitation (which I’m not really a fan of) which does make consuming information in the stream more difficult. It is a lot easier to scan a Twitter stream than a Google+ stream. Google needs to work on streamlining the stream without introducing an artificial character limitation to get same user experience as one would get with Twitter.

To cut a long story short, I think Twitter has a lot more to be worried about in the short term than Facebook. And oh, “circle” me or whatever it should be called now, on Google+.

Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

RT @allthingsd: Mark Zuckerberg’s Greatest Asset. http://dthin.gs/mRzesW

RT @TheNextWeb: Add your Facebook stream to Google+ with this browser extension http://tnw.to/19tZR

RT @hawaii: On Google+ invites, it’s not about quantity, but timing (via @seanbonner): http://j.mp/r1XVJC