Google+ has been gaining headlines this week over how quickly people have signed up for the social-networking strand of Google’s online empire.

Figures from web-traffic researcher ComScore suggest the service had reached 25 million users in just a month since launch – not bad for a project that remains in beta.

However, the thrust of the stories on the subject has been that Google+ is gaining traction far faster than social rivals Facebook and Twitter. According to the figures, it took Facebook nearly three years to attract 25m visitors, Twitter took more than 30 months and MySpace needed 20 months to reach the 25m mark.

It all sounds like Google+ is some sort of revolution, but it’s not. When Facebook started up, it was one spotty student, a computer and a few pictures of classmates. Likewise, Twitter started from small beginnings, with organic growth turning it into a mainstream application.

When Facebook started up, it was one spotty student, a computer and a few pictures of classmates

Google+ on the other hand, well, it’s from Google. It has unrivalled access to pretty much every desktop in the world through its search tools, its every move is documented through the media, and it already has a huge customer base for its other services.

Gmail alone boasts 200 million users, while Apps claims tens of millions of business users – all of which are already hardwired into the Google ecosystem.

Because of that, comparing growth rates for Google+ and its predecessors is worthless. It’s like making a fuss about the fact a new burger from McDonalds is selling faster than a revolutionary recipe from the late-night snack man selling quarter pounders outside Embankment tube station.

While MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were built from the ground up, Google has turned up at the party with a load of mates, heaps of beer and a louder music system than everyone else in the house. No wonder it’s making a noise.

In fact, if I was Google, rather than feeling smug about the number of people I’d signed up, I’d be wondering why, despite having a personal relationship with hundreds of millions of users, only 25m have stopped by to say hello.

We keep getting told that Google+ is Facebook’s biggest threat, that it’s on the rise faster than a 1990s house price and the only way is up. We’re told it already has 10 million profiles – or is it 20 million?

But is Google+ really catching on? I mean really, as in outside this little tech industry bubble we love to confine ourselves to?

I have a Google+ profile, but have to say I haven’t exactly jumped on board yet, and the biggest reason is that so few of my friends have. My feed right now comprises a lot of posts from several prominent Twitter personalities, a couple of IT friends who clearly like it a lot – and not much else. If I switch streams to seeing just my friends – as in my real, proper, non-PC Pro friends – there’s one person, and his last update was a week ago.

To fix this, I decided to import my entire Facebook friend list over to Google+ to breathe a bit of life into it. There’s no official way of doing so – Facebook doesn’t want you to, for obvious reasons – but it’s very simple to do using a Yahoo Mail account, as this blog post explains.

The result?

Of the 53 Facebook friends who weren’t already in my Google+ circles – so that’s excluding all my work colleagues and one early-adopter mate who jumped in and got bored as quickly as I did – this import found that a grand total of zero had Google+ profiles.

Yes, zero. And most of my friends are tech-literate and in their late twenties/early thirties. The prime Google+ audience.

Some have suggested it’s the lack of invites that’s the problem, and that lots of people are just waiting to be allowed in. But most people I know who wanted in have found a way – I did.

And of course, any number of these 53 people may have created new GMail accounts in order to sign up to Google+, so their Facebook email wouldn’t be recognised. But if so, none of them have mentioned their new Google+ accounts on Facebook, as you’d expect of someone trying to fill their circles.

So is this like being on Twitter during the AV vote, where my entire feed suggested YesToAV was the only possible outcome, then the real non-tweeting world said otherwise? Are we in a bubble of our own making? With the number of tech sites currently writing eulogies to Google+, and the paucity of real-life conversation on the subject, it certainly feels that way.

Try the import for yourself and let me know in the comments how many of your friends have dived in. I’d be interested to see if Google+ is anything but hype.

Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss.

It’s not that he dislikes social networking as such. He long ago signed up to Facebook with only a cursory grumble, and he’s frequently to be found sharing photographs on Twitter (@_mattbrock, if you’d like to be friends). But he tells me he’s uneasy about Google’s continued expansion into ever more online markets – and, in this case, about its acquisition of a huge amount of personal information to add to its already vast database. He has therefore decided to be a conscientious objector.

As podcast listeners will know, when it comes to issues like this, my personal privacy policy is “get over yourself”. If Google’s gurus reckon they can make money from me uploading pictures of Mike Jennings in a daft hat then I say good luck to them. Even as I nodded sympathetically along with Brock’s explanation, I admit I felt he was being perhaps a little paranoid. Did he really suppose Google had some evil master-plan?

Little did I imagine that within 24 hours I’d be eating those, er, thoughts.

Changing details

My epiphany began innocently enough that evening, when I decided to change my email address. This isn’t something I do very often, but there comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on.

There comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on

I should have realised I was opening a can of worms when I discovered there’s actually no way to change a Gmail address. To move to a new address, you must open a new account. That only takes a minute, but I was piqued to find I was unable to migrate my contacts, and to transfer my mail across I had to set up a rather roundabout POP3 transfer.

That wasn’t the only problem, as I realised when I tried to move my Google+ account to my new address. It turns out this isn’t possible either: each profile is permanently linked to the Google account it was created under. Since my Google+ profile was only a few weeks old, it wasn’t exactly stuffed with memories, but it was still irritating to have to ditch it and start afresh.

At that point my phone chirped to tell me I had a new email, and it hit me: my phone too was tied to my old Google account. A quick web search revealed that the only way to set my new address as my primary account would be to perform a factory reset and set the phone up again from scratch.

In the end, moving to a new email address meant losing access not only to my archives and my Google+ account, but also to my Android Market purchases, my Google Docs, my Google Calendar and my Google Checkout history. I also ended up losing all my stars on Angry Birds. (It may have been this realisation that really made me question the wisdom of allowing Google to control so many different services.)

Big mistake

To be fair, the root of the problem isn’t Google’s size as such, but the way it ties its services together. A well-designed database should use some sort of anonymous internal value, such as a serial number, as the key field, so that personal information can be freely modified without breaking the links between tables. Google appears to have ignored this fundamental principle, instead using the email address as the key field. That’s quite literally a schoolboy error – I learnt about key fields way back in GCSE Computer Studies – and Google should be ashamed.

But it wouldn’t be a problem if Google weren’t tying everything together in the first place. Facebook, Twitter and even PayPal accepted my new address without a murmur. If only Android were similarly decoupled from the main Google database, I’d still have my golden eggs right now.

So – to my admitted surprise – I find myself in sympathy with Brock’s position. I’ve never really believed that a big company must necessarily have a malicious agenda; but now I realise you don’t need a plan to cause havoc. With the best will in the world, people – and hence companies – make stupid decisions from time to time. The bigger we allow Google, or any company, to grow, the more scope those stupid decisions have to screw us all.

Update: I’m most grateful to Alan Robertson, in the comments below, for pointing out workarounds for some of the problems mentioned above. The latest version of the Android Market application (which, oddly, doesn’t appear to be available from the Android Market itself) does indeed allow you to install purchased applications from multiple accounts – although this of course means you have to keep your old Google account active alongside your new one, which is a pain.

More usefully, as Alan also mentions, if you have an Android phone or tablet you can configure it to sync your contacts and calendars from your old account – then switch over and resync them to your new account. I’m not sure how you’d do this without an Android device though, as importing contacts directly across Gmail accounts isn’t supported. And it’s still the case that to switch your primary account you must perform a factory reset.

In all, it seems Google is gradually addressing the problems involved in using multiple or changing identities, but there’s some way to go. And, as I mentioned above, the problems are largely ones that in a more diverse market would never have arisen in the first place!

There are, in all honesty, many other things which take priority when it comes to worrying Mr Winder: when will the central-heating boiler start working again, how much snow is going to fall today and what will my nose look like by the end of the week after surgeons have finished operating on my face, for example. Yet, for tens of thousands of Facebook users the question has obviously been weighing heavy on their minds. At least that is the only explanation I can think of to explain why a rogue Facebook app is running riot right now.

“OMG, OMG, OMG! Now you can see who viewed your Facebook profile” the scam message doing the rounds suggests, and a click on the link allows you to download an app to reveal all.

Apart from the small fact that it does nothing of the sort, of course. Indeed, click the link and you will end up on a Facebook clone page where you will be forced to jump through many hoops of the ‘I like this page and will tell all my friends’ variety before being able to download the rogue application.

If having to ‘like’ something you have yet to actually download and use doesn’t ring alarm bells then there is obviously something seriously wrong with your common sense functionality. Mind you, that’s something of a given if you have arrived at the page after responding to a message which starts with ‘OMG, OMG, OMG!’.

So, the ePrivacy, or Profile Watcher V2.1, or ProfileSpy app (it comes in many flavours) will not let you see who has viewed your Facebook profile, and for very good reason: that functionality doesn’t exist on Facebook at the moment. The official Facebook comment being “No, Facebook does not provide the ability to track who is viewing your profile, or parts of your profile, such as your photos. Applications by outside developers cannot provide this functionality, either. Applications that claim to give you this ability will be removed from Facebook for violating policy”.

What the app will do is enable those behind it to access your profile (so I guess you could say that you know one person who has done so) and spread the OMG link message via your wall. Indeed, you will need to allow it access to your profile, your friends, your wall and your data in order to download it.

If you’ve been caught already by this one, then you can delete the app by checking out the ‘applications and websites’ bit of your privacy settings. Better change your password while you’re at it, just in case.

For the past several years there’s been only one player in town: Google. So marketing experts have recommended, quite correctly, a two-pronged approach of working on search engine optimisation (SEO) for long-term traffic and Google AdWords/Display Network advertising to instantly drive potential customers to your site.

I’d hate to calculate how many hours I’ve spent learning, practising, analysing, adjusting and worrying about AdWords in particular. This is because of its near-legendary ability to drain the deepest pockets unless strict limits are set and extreme vigilance exercised. And it’s been a big success for me. AdWords has driven the success of several of my businesses and is currently performing admirably in the run up to Christmas for MakingYourOwnCandles.

But there’s always the danger that by focusing solely on one channel, however huge, you might miss the supertanker creeping up behind. Facebook is that supertanker.

If you’ve ever put your name on any marketing guru’s list, I’m pretty sure you’ll have received plenty of emails attempting to sell you the latest snake oil and presenting Facebook as the undiscovered country:“there’s gold in them thar hills” apparently. Naturally, I ignored them, put off by the hyperbole.

However, I was forced to look again when I created a promotional game for a client recently. I’d advocated creating a version for their website and a slightly enhanced Facebook game. I understood, in principle at least, the power of having players recommend the game to their Facebook friends through status updates so, given that it took relatively little effort to integrate into Facebook it was a no-brainer. After all, Facebook is now neck-and-neck with Google.co.uk when it comes to visits.

We published the application on a Monday and shut it down on Wednesday evening with 60,000 games having been completed and our server in need of an upgrade. And this was with zero publicity.

Even a stubborn goat like me pays attention when a lion bites his arse.

Here are four ways, then, to promote your business via Facebook.

1: Facebook Ads

You might think that Facebook Ads are the equivalent of Google AdWords. They are not. Remember that AdWords are triggered when a user is actively searching for something. If my ad appears when the user Googles “Christmas cake kit” then I know that they are interested in Christmas cake kits and I have fighting chance of selling one to them.

Contrast this with Facebook, where the ads appear alongside standard Facebook pages. I might be uploading a photo of Dizzy the dog and see ads for “Portsmouth Bucket List”, “Terry Pratchett Audiobook” and “Festive Walkman phone” displayed on the right hand side. This exposes the techniques and futility of the platform. I live near Portsmouth and I read Terry Pratchett so these have both been harvested from my profile. But right now, I’m uploading a picture of my dog and the chance of me allowing myself to be interrupted long enough to click on the ad, let alone buy the product, is negligible.

If anything, Facebook Ads are equivalent to Google’s Display Network (aka Adsense) network and anyone who’s marketed that way will know how much lower the clickthrough and conversion rates of the Display Network are compared with AdWords.

I am unconvinced by Facebook Ads at present. They were completely ineffective for PassYourTheory and the platform is going to have to mature greatly before it becomes as worthwhile as even Bing’s Pay-Per-Click platform.

2: Promote a business through a Facebook Page

If you have a business, you should have a Facebook Page. Not because they are especially effective (although they can be) but because they involve almost no effort at all. It’s a trivial job to set the page up to pull your blog posts into the wall, so that it’s always updating and these updates are then seen on the walls of everyone who “likes” that page.

How much effort to spend on your page depends on your business. You can integrate email service MailChimp and shopping cart BigCommerce (amongst others) directly into your page, along with a huge number of other applications so, for some businesses, a Facebook page might just be enough. I expect this to be an area that sees increasing attention from both business owners and Facebook over 2011.

3: Promote a business or product through Facebook Apps

Creating a worthwhile Facebook App is no easy task. The documentation is incomplete, often out of date and, crucially, hardly indexed at all. However, if you do create a game or app that appeals to your audience it can result in a stratospheric response in very short order – just make sure you’re prepared for the potential rush (a virtual dedicated server is ideal, I use Memset).

4: Promote an external website through Facebook Like

The single simplest way to integrate into Facebook is to add a “Like” button to your critical website pages or posts. Just pop along to  Facebook’s Developer site, fill in the form and Facebook will give you the code. When a visitor clicks on the button this page is posted to their wall, along with an optional text update (incidentally, it’ll appear higher up their wall if they choose to add text). Their friends see the update and, hopefully, some of those will visit your site too.

Worth the effort?

Given that options 2,3 and 4 are free (putting aside the cost of development in 2) this would seem to be good news. However, Facebook has a dark side. Take, for example, the MailChimp application which was unceremoniously removed by Facebook without warning and without explanation.  Now, it’s perfectly right and proper for Facebook to check whether applications obey their policies, none of us want spam posted to our walls, for example. However, the very least developers should expect is an explanation of the reason for withdrawing the app.

Imagine the scenario. You’ve spent weeks/thousands of pounds developing a Facebook app that is fundamental to your marketing strategy. You have comprehensively followed the published policies and load-tested your application to death. You launch, success arrives. Facebook kills the application.

This sort of Soviet-style thumping fist makes “Google slapping” look like two Premiership footballers in a catfight. It could literally destroy a business if they’ve based their marketing on a Facebook app and they have little option other than to guess what might have been the problem, give the app a new name and launch it again with fingers crossed.

Facebook might argue that it doesn’t derive income from apps directly and therefore can’t afford anything more than an automated system of approving and checking applications. Well, if that’s the case, I would happily pay a reasonable fee before submitting my app just to get the sort of information I need to keep on the straight and narrow.

Remember, Facebook has complete control over content it hosts. It can delete pages, kill applications and close accounts – and you might never find out why.

The answer? It’s always made sense to base your marketing on multiple channels. The three biggest online channels are Google, Facebook and email lists. Rely on only one of these and you’re exposed to disaster if, for whatever reason, that channel becomes blocked. Keep on top of the current policies and best practices and you improve your chances but sometimes these giants act without obvious logic, as MailChimp found, and if you only have one marketing leg to stand on, your business will keel over.

Oh Facebook. You never do learn, do you?

The social networking service has unveiled a shiny new “See Friendship” button on the site, letting users see “the story of their friendships”. But instead of “See Friendship” being a nice little add-on feature, Facebook has again taken it one step too far and hurled itself crossed the creepy line.

To access the new feature, a link shows up next to wall posts from friends (it’s shown up in my account, but not others here at PC Pro, so if you haven’t seen it, give it a few days as Facebook tends to do staggered roll-outs). Click it, and it pulls onto one handy page content from your Facebook friendship, such as wall posts, comments, photos and events.

Facebook software engineer Wayne Kao said in a blog post that he realised a “magical experience was possible if all of the photos and posts between two friends were brought together. You’d remember that first wall post with your best friend or the funny photo from a night out. You may even see that moment when your favorite couple met at a party you all attended.”

Isn’t that lovely? We can all embrace nostalgia and travel back in time to relive those wonderful, magical moments… Even if we weren’t actually there.

With “See Friendship”, I can not only see everything between myself and my friends, but all the content shared between two mutual friends of mine, thanks to a handy search function. It lets you enter in the names of any two friends to reveal their entire Facebook correspondence with each other — even if the content dates from before you added either as friends.

For example, I can see everything our senior staff writer Mike Jennings has said over Facebook to our editor Tim Danton — absolutely nothing, as it turns out.

Of course, all this information is already available to me. I could click around the site and find everything said between my mutual friends by sifting through their accounts. But that would take ages, and eventually — hopefully — I’d either get bored or ashamed of creeping on my friends. This makes it possible to stalk in seconds.

The next time Facebook has the idea for a whizzy new feature, it really needs to find someone normal to try it out on, such as, I don’t know, its users. A few have posted their thoughts:

“How can I disable this so people are NOT able to research which events I attended together with another friend or which photos we’re jointly tagged in? I realise this info was public before but now your ‘labor of love’ has yielded a handy tool for stalkers. DO NOT WANT, please opt me out.”

“It’s a handy tool for nosey people to gain an insight on someone else’s relationships with others which should be kept private.”

And my favourite: “I’ve always wanted this! And yes, I’m a creepy stalker.”

Of course, this being Facebook, all users are automatically opted in, and there’s no way (as of yet) to turn it off.

I don’t think so. I think its PR gurus headed off to a retreat to work out how to generate free publicity with the minimum of effort, downed a few double-strength lattés and gazed at the blue sky. And someone came up with a quite ingenious solution.

“Hey Lazarus,” said Destiny (she’s bound to be called Destiny), “why don’t we create a fake logo.”

“But, dear heart, for why?” (He’s bound to talk like a fool. I mean, just look at his name.)

“Everyone on the internet will hate it, beg that we go back to the old one, and we can then release a deeply apologetic press release with words like ‘iconic’ to describe the old logo.”

“Yeah, and ‘passionate’. I think I love you Destiny.”

Step 1: Gap quietly puts up new logo on its website, prompting the Huffington Post to quickly post a poll asking  its readers if it’s “awesome” or “terrible” (roughly 8 out of 9 say terrible).

Step 2: Comments abound on Gap’s Facebook page.

Step 3: Twitter account appears to protest against new logo.

Step 4: “Viral” site launched so people can create their own logo.

Step 5: Marka Hansen, president of Gap in North America, uses The Huffington Post to write a fluffy blog about the new logo in response to the criticism.

And so to today’s press release:

“Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo,” reads a statement from Hansen.

“Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.”

You want more? Sure you can take it? All right then:

“At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.”

And, great news, they’re going to turn the icon red over the holiday season! It’s almost – almost – as if all this was pre-planned.

Just in case you think I’m being overly cynical, allow me to point out one further thing. Whilst this is going on, Gap is literally courting controversy by suing Gapnote for its shocking decision to include the word “gap” in its name.

Of course it could be coincidence; it could really be that Gap thought a logo in a basic font with a floating blue box behind it was the right image for the new millennium; and, equally, Liverpool could win the Premiership this season.

To get everything you’ve ever done on Facebook in one handy zip file, start by heading to Account, the drop down menu in the top right hand corner of the site. Scroll down and click on  Account Settings.

If your account has download access already – it’s being rolled out, but should be in most accounts by now – then you’ll see a Download Your Information line second from the bottom of the list. (To summarise: Account │ Account Settings │ Download Your Information)

Click the link, and you’ll be brought to another page explaining the security implications of what you’re about to do. If the potential burden of having to care for your own data hasn’t scared you off, click the download button and… wait. Gathering up all your data seems to take some time, but despite my photo addiction, this took under an hour to complete.

Facebook will email you when the file is ready for download, and prompt you to enter your password — and possibly do one of its profile-photo based Friend Captchas — for added security.

The zipped file of my Facebook life ended up weighing in at 193MB. I’m rather curious if that’s average or extreme, so if you do download your Facebook activity, let us know your file size in the comments below.

The file holds all of your photos organised by your online folders, as well as a collection of everything you’ve ever said and done on the site, viewable via your browser in what looks like a stripped-down Facebook.

So now you’ve got it, all of your Facebook data — years of slacking off at work, in one handy package. But what are you supposed to do with it?

It’s easy to see why Facebook is allowing this: the site is trying to look open and friendly, proving to all 500 million users that it doesn’t really think it owns our data, but it’s unclear what we’re expected to make of  it.

If you’re really sick of Mark Zuckerberg’s constant site tweaks, you could very easily take all the files and HTML and post it online, forming your own single-person social network.  And if open-source rival Diaspora is clever, it’ll put its community to work sorting out a way to upload Facebook data to its own system.

However, the new service is likely most useful for backing up photos. Facebook recently started keeping higher-res versions of images, up to 2,048 pixels a side. That, paired with the new download system, makes the site a free and easy photo backup system. For casual photographers looking to store snaps of friends and family, that makes Facebook pretty good competition for Flickr and other photo hosting sites.

I saw The Social Network last week, as our good friends at Den of Geek had a spare ticket to an advanced screening. Thanks to a bizarre embargo, I’m not allowed to review the film yet, despite many takes already hitting the web (but when it does come out next week, go see it; it’s fascinating and very funny).

While the film has certainly made its producers very happy by winning top spot at the US box office over the weekend, and being described as the best picture of the year so far by unencumbered reviewers on the other side of the Atlantic, many tech pundits are crying foul over the negative portrayal of founder Mark Zuckerberg.

That the 26-year-old billionaire comes out looking a bit of a jerk in the film shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the story centres on two legal cases against him – and people are rarely flattering when they’re suing you.

Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is portrayed as a geek in the old-school, not so charming way: he’s brilliantly sharp, but a weird loner, rude and cruel to women, who rarely smiles. There’s something wrong with him; he’s without friends, and for good reason. According to TSN, Zuckerberg created Facebook in order to get into a club at Harvard – a claim he has denied.

I’ve never met the Facebook founder, but I’ve seen him speak at a developer event. Zuckerberg’s comedic timing is a second or two off, but he clearly has a sense of humour. Ironically, however, Zuckerberg is rather guarded about his personal life and there’s no clear picture about what he’s like as a person, leaving The Social Network the only major source of information about the Facebook founder.

It’s not only Zuckerberg who’s portrayed as a nasty sort of geek, as the film also takes aim with its “get back in the lab, you loser” gun at Napster-founder Sean Parker (played brilliantly by Justin Timberlake).

Why does it matter?

With the filmmakers, Zuckerberg and Facebook’s PR team all stressing TSN is a work of fiction, why does any of this matter? Because regardless of whether I’d enjoy sitting down for a beer with Zuckerberg (and I think I would), what he’s created deserves respect. He’s one heck of a better role model than many others his age. Wouldn’t it be better if 16-year-olds looked up to Zuckerberg, rather than, say, Wayne Rooney?

Over the past several years, the number of students studying computing in the UK has halved – despite everyone using tech more and more in their daily lives. Why? Because they say it looks boring. But there’s nothing dull about what Facebook has achieved; its a perfect example of how the internet and computers have levelled the playing field, letting talented people of any age or class truly change the world using tech.

Even if Zuckerberg is a bit of a weirdo, he’s worth celebrating for that alone.

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