There are too many users with too much history and new features added periodically on Facebook so the chance of repeating the histories of HI5 and Myspace are pretty slim.

On the other hand, Google+ is too big for Google to fail. Doing that can have worse effects than the failures that Google Buzz and Google Wave.

Instead of dying, Google+ will be re branded. From the social network it tried to be in the social hub it can be. This means that all the current (and future) assets that Google has, will be slowly and nicely integrated together under the same concept, and they will no longer be private tools but social, collaborative instruments.

And this process is not new, but in these ADHD driven times, people are (too) quickly to forget and (too) quickly prone to repeat the mistakes of the history. Google is now in the same position that Yahoo was a few years ago, but maybe they will make it work. A few years ago, Yahoo had profiles. And then they thought that they have a large enough user base to monetize those profiles and turn them into a social network. And so Yahoo 360 was born. For reasons I cannot remember, that miserably failed (as Google+ will soon) and they turned to the social hub approach and Yahoo Pulse was born (which again miserably fails failed and it will be returning to its origins as Yahoo Profiles).

But Google stands a big chance here for multiple reasons:

• Not like Yahoo, Google has a lot a real assets that people actually use
• Google has a mobile platform (and a browser, and a netbook OS) where they can push their product
• Google is deeply integrating G+ into the search results through authorship. Every author out there wants their search results optimized so they will join, use and exploit the platform

So Google+ is not dead and will not die. It will just follow its own course on another more successful track

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When G+ launched, I quickly switched from FB. Not because it was the new hot thing in town or the graphical interface of creating circles, but because of the selective sharing options.

After a few weeks, annoyed being by the continuous mass spam requests and Google ignoring the issue, I have discovered that Facebook quickly adapted and selective sharing was added. Well in fact there was there for a long time but now it simply got more visible and optimized. And I made the switch back. For good or at least for the next 2 years.

Now Google is launching pages for companies and it was forced to bring new stuff on the table to attract users from Facebook. And what they did, was simply copying the G+ personal profiles and changing a few labels. Segmenting fans of fan pages is a powerful marketing toy but without an active user base is not a tool but only a toy.

And now back to the good news: expect Facebook to retaliate in maximum 1-2 weeks (there is the pressure from the Christmas shopping season) and G+ will be once again left behind.

As a conclusion, Google+ is the greatest thing that could have happen to the users. To the Facebook users

• The API: OK, the Facebook didn’t have one in the beginning either but that’s not an excuse. I want to have apps in G+ that enhance the experience. The first one that comes in mind is Flixter app by Flixter. I want to be able to post and rate movies to my circles and get recommendations from them. Apparently Google doesn’t understand that in 2011 APIs are a must for any social service that want’s to survive.
• SPAM. Oh yeah the spam issue. I see a lot of articles about poor innocent users having their accounts suspended for being plain idiots but in real life I don’t see it. I have submitted tens of spam reports to G+ team and the accounts are still alive and kicking. And the problem has a simple fix. The issue is not the spammers, because whatever you do they will never go away. The BIG problem is G+ helping them. G+ has a feature that acts like a bug that allows anyone in 3 clicks to spam hundreds of users. It goes like this.
• You first add a few high-profile users
• Than you go to the circles tab, and find people
• On there, go to more actions, select all and add all the people to a circle
• Repeat the procedure a few times and suddenly you have thousands of users in a spam circle
• Profit
• Incoming section. Ok, basically Twitter functions the same way: any user can add anyone without reciprocating (Facebook requires a 2 way connection). But Twitter has done it better and I don’t think that is rocket science to reverse engineer it:
• Mass add is suspicious behavior on Twitter and might get your account suspended. You can’t add more than 2000 followers unless a significant percentage of them follow you back
• Twitter doesn’t annoy you on their frontpage with spam from those that have added you

And one last thing: I had expected Google to pull the big guns on Facebook and this be a quick war. Apparently until now Facebook plays catch very well and more than that pushes forward giving Google a great competitor.

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Most likely, this will be a project that will receive more and more prominence in 2010.

The tips I liked the most and were totally new to me were these:

7. Create a custom navigation sidebar – A few months ago, I showed you how to add an interactive sidebar to your Facebook Page. This is a creative way to help visitors find exactly what they are looking for on your Facebook Page.

and

10. Import your YouTube videos – Check out the application called YouTube Video Box. It includes an integrated search to find videos on YouTube and a Tab where you can display videos from YouTube. You can also import videos from an existing YouTube.com account.

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• Do not focus only on the followers of the your vertical leaders. More important than those, are the people that they follow. This are pretty hard to get persons, but also more valuable so the effort is worth it
• Use Buzzom to identify people that use your niche keywords on their bio.
• Use Buzzom to identify people that interact with your vertical leaders. For this, use the people search option and look for @username (where obviously username=the profile of your niche leaders). Those are very important profiles because they have 3 important traits: they are interested in your niche, they are active users and they interact with others from your niche

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Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch

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1. More from: [AccountName]: Videos from the same account
2. Related videos: Videos with similar characteristics (name tags and so on)

Unless you are a YT partner, the “More from” is going to be collapsed. This means that there is a high probability that any user viewing your video will leave to see an item from “Related videos” element

If you want to keep the user within your account, tag all your videos with a unique tag sequence. For example you can have the same repeating sequence of tags (3-4) and after that add the unique tags for the videos. Doing this will cause the “Related Videos” to show videos also from your account.

• Upside: once a user gets to one of your videos, the chances that he will see other videos from you are higher
• Downside: you are giving up on traffic generated by videos from other accounts

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Looking how similar the products are I’m curios how long it will take until the patent lawsuit appears. And who will win…

• as always, this article doesn’t apply to promoting regular junk spammy websites. Not because I find it immoral, but it will simply won’t work and you will only loose your time;
• during testing, one of my twitter accounts got suspended for aggressive following so consider yourself warned and try to stay below the radar;

A few weeks ago, Google decided to penalize one of my websites. Instead of jumping to correct whatever Google thought it was inappropriate, I saw this as an opportunity to identify additional traffic sources.
After playing around with twitter and some tools here are the results:

Goals:

• Increase the number of followers on Twitter in a short amount of time

Tools you will need:

TwintIn: In the beginning I used Flash Tweet but this is now a payed service. Buzzom is one of the best free tools on the market. Here are a few important features:

• Cross follow – this allows you to give a twitter ID and start following followed or followers of that account
• Lock - this feature is pretty unique across twitter tools. Basically allows you to mark (lock) a twitter ID to prevent unfollowing a certain group of users or to send multiple requests to the same user (if you repeatedly follow/unfollow users). If I would have used this feature from the beginning my suspended account would be active right now
• Find users by keywords they twit or in their bios

Hootsuite: This is a twitter manager tool that gives you the following:

• Use multiple twitter accounts
• Post a feed to a twitter account of your choice
• Track clicks on the links from the tweets you send

Cotweet: The features that this service has are already implemented in Hootsuite but I like it’s clean interface and the archive options.

Steps:

1. Create a twitter account. Customize it (background/colors/avatar/bio). Don’t forget to add a link to your website
2. Start posting content. Use Hotsuite to post your feed
3. Identify key players on your niche. Wefollow is a good start. If that’s not enough, look on the top blogs on your niche. There is a great chance that they use twitter. Look what people this players follow. Start engaging in conversations. Reply, retweet, participate in the follow friday hashtag
4. Once you have a decent amount of tweets (more then 100 for example), start following users. You will do this by using Cross Follow feature of TwitIn to “steal” the followers of the users identified in step 3. In order to prevent suspention don’t get greedy. Follow a maximum of 3-400 users/day.
5. After 24-72hrs, start unfollowing people that didn’t followed you back. Use the Flush&Lock feature of TwitIn. This will prevent you from sending multiple requests to the same person and get your account suspended
6. Use cotweet to monitor the messages you receive and reply to them. Don’t even bother to reply to automatic messages, and even better you can unfollow those people right away. In most of the cases they are just spam bots
7. Repeat steps 3-4

Conclusions

If not abused, this short tutorial will bring you a nice followers base (4-6000) in apx 1 month and a half (numbers might vary from niche to niche)

If you re new with twitter or if you would like to know more about the subject, check out this books:

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