Google+ and Quora

Just too busy lately to squeeze time to blog, not with less than 6 hrs of sleep per night. However, I feel better today and get something to blog about.

I was invited by my colleague to join Google+, the latest and most formidable Facebook competitor so far. Listened to Buzz Out Loud podcast last night, there expect 10M people will have join Google+ by end of this week. Having tried that today, I like to clean look of it, but not yet really doing much about it expect playing with the ‘Circle’ feature which allow me to group friends into categories. As I don’t really depends on Google’s address book, rather Facebook and my iPhone contacts are what I used, which are neither linked to Google+. Setting up contacts will be a key issue. Heard that there are 3^rd parties programs allow Facebook contacts to be transferred to Google+ out there, but security was cited as a concern. I guess I will stay put for that for the time being. So far, I think the problem for Google+ is to have killer feature that persuade Facebook users to jump ship. For me, I’m not jumping ship, simply taking a brief tour to see what Google+ is all about. However, Google+ has not been able to convince me to jump ship. That’s not good for Google, cuz, unlike other apps, social media is a platform that we all take time to maintain, and nobody has the time to maintain more than one. So, I think Google is though excited to have exponential growth of users signing up Google+, they better work their ass off to add killer features quick to convince Facebookees to jump ship. Otherwise, without measuring the real traffic, i.e. staying time on Google+ and update frequency, simply getting big number of Google+ members is simply a hot air balloon – not a real success.

I also signed up as an user of Quora.com. It is a site getting popular in the States, starting from the Valley, as a more serious and engaging tool that rival Ask.com or Yahoo! Answers. So far, I like what I see. If they can allow users to trim the extract of items for what they see on the screen, and a better organization of different topics in the UI, that would be perfect. I think it will be a very good tool for people like me who have high curiosity into things. As a good companion of Wikipedia, it is fun!