Having not visited my Google+ page for three months, I put up a quick post last week to say hello and see if any friends and acquaintances were still hanging out there.
One person replied, “Welcome back (to silent town).”
That pretty much says it all about my experience of Google’s social networking Web site, which launched nine months ago to much fanfare. The excitement and buzz wore off quickly — as much as I liked Google’s fresh approach to organizing my online friends and acquaintances, it wasn’t enough to lure me and my social circles away from Facebook.
Screen shots by David Chen, Taipei Times
My friends and I aren’t alone. Facebook users clearly outnumber Google plusers, with 845 million “monthly active” users (as of December 2011), compared to the 170 million people that Google says have “upgraded” to use Google+.
And a recent report by Web research company comScore says Google+ users spend just a small amount time on the site compared to their Facebook counterparts. According to the report, in January, users spent an average of three minutes on Google+ compared to over seven hours on Facebook. (In Taiwan, Facebook is ahead of Google as the second most visited Web site, after Yahoo.com, according to Alexa.com).
But to be fair, Google+ is still young and it would be premature to say that the service is forever doomed to be a virtual ghost town. Google claims a steadily growing number of users and the company continues to tweak its new social service.
Screen shots by David Chen, Taipei Times
Several weeks ago, Google+ received a major facelift and now sports an improved visual design for its Web site. Everything is more clearly marked and easier to find, with all navigational elements now placed in a vertical column on the left. This “ribbon,” as Google calls it, has clearly labeled icons for your home page, profile or photos, which are now called apps. “Hangouts,” the video conferencing feature in which you can chat with up to 9 people, is now featured prominently with its own app, as are photos and online games.
And like Facebook, your online contacts are listed in a long vertical column on the right, dotted with the green, yellow and red dots familiar to users of gmail chat.
Google+’s main feature, the stream (posts from friends or people that you follow), has been edged closer to the left. This is strange at first as everything is off-center, with a large empty column of white space on the right half of the page. Despite this design flaw, photos and videos in posts appear much larger, which makes for a better viewing experience.
Although these cosmetic changes make a notable difference on Google+ — I wish Facebook were this clutter-free — it’s going to take more from Google to pry folks away from the world’s number one social network.
Yet, there is still activity to be found on Google+. If you’re going to give it another go, try the Explore app, which shows a stream of popular posts (this used to be called What’s Hot) and is a good place to catch the latest and greatest viral photos and videos. Google has also added a small Trending column, a la Twitter, that lets you know what everyone is buzzing about. Unfortunately, that feature isn’t yet available in Mandarin.
Explore reminded me what I liked about Google+: the serendipity factor. A few random searches quickly led to some people with interesting posts, which in turn led to a few novelties. I ran into a set of fascinating photos of Taiwan in 1972 taken by the journalist Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired Magazine, as well as beautiful shots of the East Coast by Tom Anderson, one of the co-founders of MySpace (remember your first MySpace friend?), who happened to be visiting Taiwan.
And of course, you can catch up with celebrities like Lady Gaga or Hugh Jackman, who are both currently popular on the site. Mando-pop singer Valen Hsu (許茹芸) is still one of the most followed Google plusers among Taiwanese users.
PINTERESTING
So where’s everybody at, other than Facebook? The latest craze in the social networking world is Pinterest (pinterest.com), an online bulletin board for images and photos.
The Web site has created a huge buzz in the US, ranking as the third most popular social networking site in that country, falling just behind Facebook and Twitter. The site is officially still in beta and only in English, but there is activity to be found by Mandarin-speaking netizens. Incidentally, Pinterest has already spawned a blatant copycat Web site in China, “wantu” (頑兔, wantu.taobao.com).
Pinterest, which describes itself as a “virtual pinboard,” allows you to create personalized visual scrapbooks on the Web.
If Facebook is all about telling people what you’re doing, Pinterest is all about showing them what you’re looking at.
One reason Pinterest has become wildly popular is because of its visual smorgasbord presentation. The site arranges photos collected by users in organized collages that look like a quirky collection of stock photography, with all images framed neatly in white borders of varying sizes).
So far, the site has been touted as a tool for collecting ideas for weddings or home decor. Cute pet pictures and food are common items — I spotted lots of photos of cupcakes, cookies and sweets on the popular posts page. Pinterest also lends itself well to feeding the visual obsessions of design fanatics and fashionistas.
The way it works: post images on your Pinterest page, either by uploading photos that you’ve taken yourself from a computer or smartphone. Another way to collect images is to install a Pin It button in your Web browser and then “pin” any image or video you see on a Web site to one of your “boards.” Boards let you divide your interests by topic, which can be about anything you like — by default, the Web site starts you off with boards such as My Favorite Places and Spaces, and Recipes.
But the other half of what makes Pinterest tick is its social component: You follow other people as you would on Twitter, and comment on each others’ pins. You can also “re-pin” the image to a board on your own page and even create and maintain boards with other subscribers.
At the moment, women comprise the Web site’s core users — the site feels like a zany offshoot of Etsy.com. But marketers and online shops are also seeing promotional possibilities, as are media outlets such as Time Magazine (pinterest.com/time_magazine) and Newsweek (pinterest.com/newsweek).
Then there are the politicians and celebrities. US President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign has a page (pinterest.com/barackobama/), but Taiwanese politicians aren’t quite in the game yet. Former Democratic Presidential party candidate and DPP chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) appears to have started her own Pinterest account, though there’s not much on her page. President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) isn’t doing any pinning, though that could change if Pinterest’s addictive allure catches on in Taiwan as it has in the US.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would