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Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the crowd of journalists summoned to the company’s Palo Alto headquarters to reveal new Facebook features designed to tackle the Google+ threat. He began by saying that the industry is quickly approaching an inflexion point where focus will be on apps rather than the number of registered users. Facebook has over 750 million users, he said. Facebook is  hoping to zoom past the one billion mark in the near future, he said, predicting that the social networking industry at large will soon measure its user base in billions.

Social today is about sharing. It’s about what people do on social networks, what content they share and so forth. Sharing on Facebook is growing at an exponential rate, said the executive who famously had the “I’m CEO, bitch” tagline printed on his business card in the early days. Today, an average Facebook user is sharing twice as much than the previous year and in 2012 will share double the items shared today. “We’re at the elbow of the curve,” Zuck said. For example, people share four billion things on aggregate each day on Facebook. This figure excludes direct interactions between users, such as instant messages.

He then took this huge jab at Google:

We just have this belief at Facebook validated by the success of Facebook, entrepreneurs who focus on one thing do better.

Zuckerberg predicted proliferation of apps which are “the biggest driver for us”. Mobile and the ability to segment stuff into groups are the #2 and #3 things for the company, respectively, he said. The CEO then proceeded to unveil an improved Groups feature, a redesigned chat and an all-new video calling via Skype. More about that plus a nice promo clip showing off Skype video calling right below the fold.

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Google+ user Ufuk Kayserilioglu was able to use his Google Apps account in Google+ for a short time today — sorta. As he notes below, he was able to sign into Google+ with a Google Apps account with some accidental trickery.

I discovered it by accident: I was logged into Google+ with my Google Account and into my Google Apps account (on the Paralaus domain), as secondary, with multiple sign-on. For some reason Google decided to log me off all my Google accounts. At that point, I made the initial login with my Google Apps account and secondary with my Google Account. I was unaware that Google+ was open on another tab. I tried to reshare something publicly, and was confused that it was saying Paralaus where it should be saying Public. Picking that options told me that only “People on Paralaus can find and view” my post. It was then that I realized I was able to use Google+ with my Google Apps account in a hybrid mode where I was not fully logged in but some elements were available; almost as a preview. ;)

Our own Seth Weintraub would love to see this feature come to Google+, as I’m sure many of you would too. While this was just a ‘preview’, we do expect Google Apps support to come very soon.

via Google Operating System
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Facebook has a nifty feature that allows users to give their profile a link like facebook.com/9to5Google, instead of facebook.com/19238288asd8a8. This feature allows for easier sharing of profiles, and sadly the new social network Google+ doesn’t offer anything of the sort. We’ve stumbled upon a new website, called Gplus.to, that allows Google+ users simply create a shortened URL for their Google+ profile. The shortened URL will be something along the lines of gplus.to/9to5google.

The shortened URL is pretty easy to setup, with the help of a little guide on the website. Gplus.to is currently boasting 32,000 users, and it seems to be growing at a fast pace. If you have a profile on Google+ why not give this a try? Let us know how it goes.
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[UPDATE 1, July 5, 2011  8:31 Eastern]: Facebook has blocked the Chrome extension for exporting friends  Author Mohamed Mansour wrote on the extension page that “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.”

Transferring your Facebook contacts to Google+ is a bit tricky because of, you know, the walled garden of Facebook which restricts how you can take your social graph elsewhere (unlike the Google Takeout service). Some workarounds tackle the issue, like the Friends to Gmail web app which will copy your Facebook contacts to Gmail. You can also pull a similar stunt via Yahoo Mail. Both solutions, however, require that you first copy Facebook friends to an online address book and then use this data to build your social graph on Google+.

A new Chrome extensions takes the pain out of this, allowing you to continue building your Facebook relationships on Google’s social service in one easy step. It’s called Facebook Friend Exporter and right now works only with the English version of Facebook and only via standard HTTP connection (SSL Facebook isn’t supported yet). What’s best…

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Google+ is not yet available to the general public, but if first impressions from early adopters (read: journalists) are indicative of its potential, Google may have nailed the social thing this time. Google+ out-innovates Facebook on several aspects, including the integrated audio/video chat feature, fine-tuned sharing features, the ability to create ad-hoc networks and more. The hype and the headlines have not escaped the attention of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who figured he might as well join the damn thing and see why all the fuss.

Of course, it’s hard to establish authenticity of Zuckerberg’s alleged profile on the Google+ service, first outed by Forbes. Dana Brunetti, one of the producers of The Social Network movie, apparently added Mark Zuckerberg to his “People I did a Movie About” social circle on Google+. If it’s genuine, however, we’re giving Zuck a thumbs-up for having the guts to create a public profile on a rival network and the curiosity to explore the life beyond the walls of Facebook.

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At this point, it seems pretty obvious that Google means business with the Google Plus platform. Besides all of the other areas Plus has engulfed, it looks like Google is heading into the gaming realm.  The following code snippet was found in the web page code

“have sent you invites and more from Google+ Games”

So now Google is taking on Microsoft’s Xbox and Apple’s Gamecenter. Perhaps Google might want to lower the barrier to entry..
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Our invites came in and we’re up and running.  Here’s the initial reactions:

The first annoying thing is that Google hasn’t allowed Apps for Domains in yet.  They are “working on it”.  If you are like me and have your life in a Google Domain account this is a major pain.  I’m going to have to reconnect to everyone and they are going to have to put me in their circles all over again.  Bad start.

Once signed in, the interface is very “Facebook feeling” Google has found a lot of people who know me or are in my contacts so adding them to circles is easy.  Unfortunately my gmail.com account has a lot of people from school (when I used it last) and not a lot of the people I deal with on a day to day basis.

Friends seem to be coming in from way back in history – very Facebook like.

It will be interesting to see how Google keeps people coming in and more importantly coming back.

Because I can’t stay logged into this and my normal Apps Google account at the same time, it won’t get used very much.  I imagine there are a lot of power users in this exact same boat.  I wonder what Google’s plan for this is.  I’m hoping there is going to be a merge button at some point in the future.

Overall, I have to say that the product feels very good…like if all of my Facebook Friends came in, I’d probably leave Facebook immediately.  But how do I use both at the same time?

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The Facebook for Android app has been updated giving users the ability to upload video, see more story types in news feed, and browse Page walls, reports Inside Facebook. In this age, being able to post video is obviously a crucial feature. Users take videos everyday, especially on their smartphone, and want to share them with their friends.  Lastly, when users browse to a Facebook Page they can view the Page’s wall to read news and updates.

Facebook for iPhone still has the upper-hand when it comes to features, but these updates are a step in the right direction.
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The folks at Fusible have been doing some sleuthing on the possibility of Google putting together a social network based on photos.  They found that Google has trademarked the name Photovine with the following under the following areas:

Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software
IC 038. US 100 101 104. G & S: Communication services, namely, transmission of visual images and data by telecommunications networks, wireless communication networks, the Internet, information services networks and data networks

IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Non-downloadable computer software

IC 045. US 100 101. G & S: On-line social networking services

Additionally, a company who uses MarkMonitor to anonymously register domain names has bought photovine.com from a private holder.  Google is one of the companies that uses MarkMonitor.

Clearly that spells out a photo-sharing social network.

So, are Picasa/Picnik online services about to get more social under a new brand name?  All signs point to ‘yes’.

(Google Weddings, a mashup of similar Google services pictured above)
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It doesn’t get any better than this folks. Dan Lyons, who has a contentious relationship with Bursten’s Jim Goldman (especially from his days as a CNBC reporter, above) busted the mystery Google smear campaign wide open.  It turns out, it wasn’t Apple and it wasn’t Microsoft trying to smear Google.  It was Facebook.

I won’t spoil it but knowing how much Lyons loves Jim Goldman, he must be in hog heaven right now.
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