Richard MacManus explains how Google+ has evolved over the past year and whether it delivered on its promise. Mobile continues to dominate in 2012. After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
How Google+ Has Morphed Over The Past Year & What We Can Expect in 2013
One year ago, Google+ launched to the world and was greeted with the collective cry, “Not another social network!” But over the past year Google+ has cemented its position as one of the Big Three social networks, alongside Facebook and Twitter. Or has it? Google+ boasts similar user numbers to Twitter, but if we look more closely we see that Google+ hasn’t lived up to its initial promise as a new type of social network. In fact, it’s morphed into something completely different for Google… More
Top Trends of 2012: The Continuing Rapid Growth of Mobile
In our half-yearly review of the top Internet trends of 2012, there’s been a common theme: mobile is the main driver for all of them. The Visual Web (Instagram, Pinterest and similar image-focused apps), the Consumer Cloud (Evernote, Dropbox, iCloud and others), social video apps (Socialcam and Viddy) and video on tablets (BuzzFeed, Flipboard and others). Each of those trends are popular in 2012 because of smartphones and/or tablets. More
In Closing Its Platform, Twitter Risks Destroying Its Community
After attaining unlikely success as an open platform, Twitter is demanding that third-party apps show Twitter’s stream the way the company wants them to. “You need to be able to see expanded Tweets,” Product Manager Michael Sippey wrote in an announcement on Friday afternoon. He said those features make Twitter “more engaging and easier to use.” But if Twitter squeezes too hard on third-party developers, it risks damaging something more important to the company than any set of features: It risks destroying the culture that has grown up around it. More
More Top Stories
Facebook Blames Email Problems On User “Confusion”
If you’re missing email messages, don’t blame Facebook: The social network says you are simply “confused.” Facebook spent a second straight weekend dealing with complaints from users about a switch in the default user email addresses, this time with users complaining that the change was resulting in lost messages and contacts. More
Where Google Is Going Next: 5 Things You Need to Know
On the last day of the Google I/O developers conference, we sat down with engineering director Peter Magnusson to digest the introduction of Compute Engine, which adds Google-scale processing power to the company’s list of cloud offerings designed to take on Amazon Web Services. Here are the announcement’s five key implications.
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