Since I’ve already been on a Google+ few weeks now (I had an invitation to try out the service the day before it launched – one of the small perks of writing a tech blog), and since I’ve already received an email invitation to try out the next brand new web service (the US rollout of Spotify),  I guess it’s about time I shared my impressions of Google’s planned Facebook-killer.

During the first day or two of Google+, you really had to “know a guy who knows a guy” to get an account, but if the recent escalation in the number of friends and family showing up there is any indication, they’re scaling up the service more aggressively than they did with Gmail a few years ago.

Although they’re keeping quiet about the numbers, some recent independent research estimates that about 20 million people have signed up as of this past weekend.  Just to put that in context, Facebook claims over 750 million active users.  On the surface, that would seem to represent some pretty substantial  inertia in Facebook’s favor – but the tipping point syndrome can be pretty brutal in the social networking world (imagine a cocktail party in which each guest can anonymously and painlessly bail out of if it turns out the cool kids are heading on over to the party down the street).

This point  is not lost on Facebook – in fact, Mark Zuckerberg is “keeping his enemies close” via a Google+ account of his own that’s ended up in over a quarter of a million Google+ user’s Circles – but has yet to contain a single post.

After playing around with it a bit, I think Google+ can objectively be said to have the edge over Facebook in terms of simplicity and transparency – and on a more subjective level, I believe there are a few other things to like about Google+, as well…

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There’s a new social networking service in town. It’s called Google+/Google Plus. The beta isn’t fully open to the public yet.

There’s a lot of nerdy/media-y navel-gazing going on there right now.

There will be advantages to businesses, political organizations and non-profits down the road.

There are some features “stolen” from other social networks; others are brand new. Users will like some things and hate others.

The end.

I never really ‘got’ Facebook – so when someone at Google asked me yesterday to take part in the initial trial of their new Google + social media platform, I decided to read up on it a bit first to see whether it might be worth my time.

I have to say, after looking into it a bit, I was intrigued – intrigued enough to try it out over the next few weeks.

Why?  Because Google+ seems to address the one reason I’ve avoided Facebook: the list of things I would want to say socially in exactly the same way to every person I know is a pretty short list.

The folks behind the Google+ project seem to get it – Google’s new social media platform appears to be built upon the notion of groups, and it appears to be designed that way from the ground up.  This is in stark contrast to the opt-in, after-the-fact group-filtering mechanisms other social media platforms seem to have implemented reluctantly and seem to prefer you wouldn’t use.

And according to Bradley Horowitz (who along with Vic Gundotra is in charge of  the Google+ project), that’s just what’s wrong with today’s social media sites:  “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”

Amen, brother.   So I’ve just logged into my trial account and had a quick look around – I think I’ll give this Google+ project a try.  As a confirmed social media skeptic, it’ll be interesting to see if it feels like there’s something worthwhile there… stay tuned.

Take Al Gore, Gore Vidal, or Vidal Sassoon. Would any of these gentlemen have turned as successful had their parents picked less recognizable names for them?

Likely. After all, how do you explain the success and phenomenon around someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Gisele Bundchen?

Clearly, it’s not about one’s given name, but how you manage to *live*it: fill it with life, meaning and gestalt. To put it into today’s social media speak, it’s about how you create the brand of you!

But what happens if social media turns into the new go-to engine for parents eager to hone in on the ultimate name for their kid? What happens if the über-popular engagement platform begins to not just promote but indeed shape parents’ decisions on what to name their kids?

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Yup! It’s that time of the year again. I am headed for Las Vegas, to scan the halls of the #1 annual electronics bonanza – CES – short for Consumer Electronics Show.

Probably the key highlight for this year’s show – more electronics OEMs find religion in portable mobility. As far as exhibitors’ new devices announcements go, the excitement is virtually palpable.

Especially with 4G connectivity helping to better connect them all.

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Grab a seat, sit back, and enjoy the show as the two uncontested giants of their field appear destined to wage a battle of epic proportion…  If it’s Google and Apple we’re talking about, developments on several fronts just this past week have only contributed to the inevitability of just such a scenario:

• Apple goes into advertising (the iAd platform that’s an integral part of the just-released Iphone OS 4)
• Google’s Android mobile OS makes solid advances in the high-growth Smartphone market (Gartner recently reporting that Android will overtake Apple’s iOS by 2012)
• Both companies continue to quietly work away on the last frontier: the stubborn problem of implementing a viable lean-back  internet video solution (I have a hunch that Apple is leveraging their monitor expertise and building a television)
• Both CNET and the WSJ report that Google is planning to unveil a music streaming/download service tied to their search engine, while Apple works to move iTunes from a desktop app to the cloud.

Meanwhile, although largely overshadowed by World Cup soccer, this past week also saw the start of Wimbledon – so if the uncontested giants we’re talking about are Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, recent events also offer the possibility of a similar clash of the titans.  If the two can manage to make it to the mens’ singles finals, tennis fans around the world will grab a seat, sit back and enjoy a show of their own: a rematch of the 2008 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, often considered the greatest tennis match ever played.

It’s maybe a good time, then, for a few thoughts on Google (arguably the Roger Federer of consumer internet technology) and Apple (perhaps the Rafael Nadal of consumer electronics)…

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I got a mass email from one of my city council members the other day.

Where I live, there’s a pretty good chance that any news coming from city hall could have something to do with the latest mass FBI indictments, city officials arrested for being drunk and disorderly, or 25% property tax increases – but this email instead concerned one of our more forward-thinking council person’s plans to apply on behalf of the city to take part in Google’s experimental 1 gigabit fiber-to-the-home network trial program.

1 Gbps internet access – imagine web apps running as crisply as locally-installed desktop applications, HD video streaming at lower compression rates, 30 frame-per-second Skype video calls, and lastly, as computing cycles move from the CPU on your desktop (or your lap) up into the cloud, ever-thinner operating systems.

And that’s where Google comes in.  You may not have heard much about Chrome OS yet, but you will soon.

Because Google has …A Plan.

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Here in the west, the intrinsic value of individual innovation and intellectual property is such an ingrained ideal we can take it for granted sometimes.  Not so in Asia, where the blatant imitation of successful products is often the sincerest form of flattery.

This is especially true when it comes to popular culture and technology.  Twitter has been so phenomenally successful that it’s now arguably both a cultural and technological phenomenon  – so maybe it’s worth taking a look at a few of the Asian Twitter clones out there.

The first thing one notices is that most of these sites use the same shade of turquoise blue and the same style of font used in the original.  Again, to western eyes, copying the Twitter look and feel so slavishly might seem utterly shameless – yet it’s just another example of the how different the Asian mindset is from ours when it comes to such matters.

It should come as no surprise there are several Twitter knock-offs in China – but there are also more innovative sites as well.  Take, for example, digu (below).  This Chinese Twitter clone features an interface that pops up real-time geo-located balloons of posts as they occur (much like similar western sites such as twittervision).

It’s worth noting, though, that digu’s interface is really just a Google Maps-powered mashup.  It’ll be interesting to see if Google continues to make their API available to Chinese sites like digu  in the event they do end up pulling out of the search business in China…

Maybe you’ve heard -  Google has recently discovered a rash of China-based malware attacks targeting not only Google, but dozens of other major US companies (and certain gmail users) as well.  In response, the company has decided that the practice of censoring Google.cn search results – a practice the company had previously accepted as part of doing business in China since 2005  -  is no longer quite so acceptable.  Google’s decision to defy the Chinese government at the expense of the sizable investment the company has already made in the world’s most rapidly growing internet market was  remarkable – and it was announced in an equally remarkable fashion: via a post on the official company blog written by Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond.

China, for its part, is not blinking.

As Strother Martin once told Paul Newman, what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Will Google leave China?  It now seems almost as likely as Conan leaving NBC.

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