Interesting Snippets

On a daily basis, 50m people who have created a Google Plus account actively use the company’s Google Plus-enhanced products, Mr. Gundotra said. Over a 30-day period, he said, that number is 100m active users.

Although these numbers sound impressive, the catch is that Google Plus-enhanced properties include YouTube, the Android Marketplace and Google.com, the company’s flagship search engine. Yet Google contends that these numbers illustrate that more than 100 million people have signed up for a Google Plus account and are now actively engaging with Google Plus-related products

Google is playing for the long term, but it feels it has no choice but to make these moves now. It’s in a “rip off the band aid” phase… Google had identified a central and existential threat to its future, and that threat is….us. Or rather, the fact that Google doesn’t have a direct relationship with us, in the way Apple or Facebook does….
… let’s think about our relationship with Google, circa mid 2011, before Google+ was introduced. For most of us, Google meant search, and the majority of us used search anonymously – we weren’t logged in…. Hundreds of millions of us also used other Google products – Picasa for photos, YouTube for culture fixes, Gmail for communication, Blogger for expression, Maps, Docs, and lord knows what else for productivity. …. As customers, we saw Google as one brand, but the truth is, we used its various services as if each came from a different company.

And that meant Google couldn’t compete with Apple or Facebook when it came to any number of crucial factors. It had no single point of reference for communicating with its customers. It had no way to link its services and provide consistent updates, policy changes, or shared uses …
And this created one Very Big Problem for Larry Page & Co: Google couldn’t be elegant, or design driven, or easy to use. And we consumers have proven that we really, really want those things in our web services.
So Google held its nose, built Google+ as its connective tissue, and plunged into a world of pain. It’s not over yet, but the game is afoot

ChefHangout is a site where chefs can charge for cooking lessons and it sits on top of the Google Hangout product. The lessons are scheduled throughout the day and can cost upwards of $20 a piece. That’s not a lot of money when you’re getting an intimate and interactive lesson from a professional chef

Daria Musk has amassed over 24,000 followers on Google+…
Using the live video platform from Google+, Hangouts, Musk has been able to play hours of live music for an always changing audience. … Sure, its not the first live video platform, but its the first platform to have a social networking machine behind it. At any given moment of the day, Daria can play a “show” for hundreds of people over a period of an hour