In July I wrote that I wasn’t quite sure as to how I was going to use Google plus. A few months on and it turns out I just don’t. This video from College Humor pretty much summarises my position.

“You, like us, understand that the biggest revolution in social networking would be for there to be no more revolutions in social networking.”

Well said.

A round up of some bizarre, offbeat or just plain odd social media news from the past week.

How a Tweet Led to a Full Steak Dinner Delivered to the Airport | Time

• Unfortunately, that airport was in Newark.

20 Percent of Cosmo Readers Would Give Up Sex for Facebook | LA Weekly

• “We knew Cosmo readers were a strange bread…”

Were Facebook Planners Of U.K. Riots Unfairly Punished? | All Facebook

• Yep.

STUDY: 1 in 5 Use Facebook For Emergencies | All Facebook

• Frightening.

Merriam-Webster Adds Tweet To Dictionary | All Twitter

• How modern.

Retweet Added To Oxford English Dictionary | All Twitter

• Oh Oxford, not you too.

German Officials Say ‘Nein’ To Facebook’s Like Button | All Facebook

• Sort of.

What’s The First Thing NASA’s Humanoid Robot Does After Waking Up? Starts Tweeting, Of Course | All Twitter

• Totally worth it.

Andy Levy vs Chris Brown: Epic Twitter Battle [VIDEO] | All Twitter

• I hate Chris Brown, and this is an epic take down.

Only one year? Feels like a lot longer. And according to Mashable, it’s (still) huge:

Facebook said Thursday that 10,000+ websites add the Like Button every day — identical to what COO Sheryl Sandberg said in October last year. In other words, the growth of the Like button hasn’t slowed down in the past six months. The social network says more than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook so far, including more than 80% of the top 100 websites in the U.S.

And international. Just might ‘Arr!’ something later.

On reflection though, I find that I tweet far more stories than I ‘Like’.

Sorry, Lady Gaga: Rihanna Is Now the Most Popular Woman on Facebook

Rihanna has overcome Lady Gaga to become the most popular woman on Facebook.

Long hailed as the queen of social media, Lady Gaga was the first living music artist to reach 10,000,000 Facebook fans, beating president Obama in that “race” by about 700,000.

However, not even Gaga is untouchable… As of this writing, Rihanna has 40,564,950 Facebook fans, some 20,000 more than Lady Gaga‘s 40,543,536.

(via Mashable)

One in ten pets is on Facebook

One in ten of all UK pets have their own Facebook page, Twitter profile or YouTube channel, and more than half of UK pet owners are sharing photos of their pets online.

The rise of pets online has also seen a number of owners joining dedicated sites, with names such as Critter, Catster and Doggie Dating.

(via Telegraph)

Brit weds after meeting his bride 5,000 miles away on Facebook’s Hot Or Not application

When Gisele Cunha uploaded her picture to Facebook’s “Hot or Not” application she ­hoped the results would boost her confidence.

She never imagined that 5,000 miles away in Abedare, South Wales, the man of her dreams was downloading the very same ­application – and that it would lead to love.

(via Mirror)

Lawsuit Seeks $8,386.88 For Failed Facebook Romance

A 50-year-old unemployed woman has filed a $8,386.88 lawsuit against a 35-year-old man who humiliated her after ending their Facebook relationship.

Cheryl Gray of Michigan and Wylie Iwan of Washington state met through the game Mafia wars on Facebook and eventually developed an online relationship. She booked a trip to visit him, and about a week before her scheduled departure he revealed that he’d met someone else.

(via All Facebook)

Most UK parents now spy on their children online

More than half of British parents snoop on their children’s online activity, a study has revealed.

Researchers found millions of mums and dads resort to checking up on their youngsters’ goings-on on Facebook, looking through sent emails and internet history.

(via Newslite)

Facebook Video Prompts Charges For Mouse Murder

A young Caboolture, Australian woman, who filmed herself killing a live mouse and posted the footage on Facebook now faces criminal charges.

According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the U.K.’s leading animal welfare charity, the little creature took approximately 40 seconds to die in the grisly video, as the woman just stood by and watched.

(via All Facebook)

Medics warned over Facebook risks

Medics are being warned to take extra care when using social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

The British Medical Association guidance highlighted a series of potential pitfalls doctors face.

It comes after a series of cases in which NHS staff and other public sector workers have got into trouble through their use of social media.

(via BBC)

Fox News’s hacked Twitter feed declares Obama dead

Fox News has apparently fallen victim to hacking, with its politics Twitter feed repeatedly announcing President Barack Obama had been shot dead.

@foxnewspolitics began tweeting the information to its 33,000 followers at about 2am local time, with the posts rapidly being shared around the internet.

(via The Guardian)

Mark Zuckerberg Is The Most Followed User On Google+

In what has to be somewhat embarrassing for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed user on Google+, according to the Google+ Statistics counter.

(via TechCrunch)

NBA Coaches Fined $1 Million If They Retweet Players During Lockout

The NBA is doing what it can to keep coaches and general managers away from the players during the lockout – even threatening a massive $1 million fine for any coach caught retweeting or even just @mentioning a player on Twitter.

(via All Twitter)

Paypal UK Twitter Profile Hacked By Angry Customer

The Twitter profile of Paypal UK was hacked, this time by what appears to be an unhappy customer. The hijacker posted a series of critical messages against the service, and also changed the avatar, bio and the profile URL.

(via All Twitter)

Greenpeace’s Spoof Of Volkswagen’s Star Wars Ad Removed From YouTube

The viral film, which has already had around two million views, is part of Greenpeace’s aggressive campaign against the car-maker’s environmental record.

YouTube bowed to pressure from LucasFlim, the creators of ‘Star Wars’, to remove the video after it complained. The video, a spoof of Volkswagen’s own advert ‘The Force’, features a legion of seven-year-old children armed with light sabers taking on Volkswagen.

(via PR Week)

Naked civil servant who mocked Eric Pickles is stripped of job

Mark Upton, who teased Conservative ministers under the pseudonym “Naked Civil Servant”, was unmasked after a seven-month investigation by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Mr Upton, a senior civil servant in the department’s strategy and programme unit, was told this week that his postings on the Twitter website constituted gross misconduct.

(via The Telegraph)

MP rails against fake wife site on Twitter

“Mr Speaker, I don’t know if you tweet but can I direct you to the site called Mrs Jennie Bone on Twitter, which is being followed by more than 100 people, including journalists and Members of Parliament.

“It’s very interesting and very amusing. There’s one slight problem: it’s completely bogus and this seems to me to be a really big issue, where people are taking other names and purporting [to be them].”

He called for a debate on the issue of internet impersonation.

(via BBC)

Belarus Blocks Twitter, Facebook On Holiday

The authoritarian government had tried to thwart the protest by blocking access to Facebook, Twitter and a major Russian social networking site used by the organizers.

Eager to avoid protests on the national holiday, the government on Saturday began blocking access to the social media sites, including VKontakte, a Russian version of Facebook.

(via Huffington Post)

Credit: XKCD

It’s been less than a week since the launch of Google+ and like most in the industry, I’ve been tinkering with it creating (too many?) Circles and at every stage comparing it to Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr.

And so far, I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to use it in the long term.

It’s not that I don’t ‘get’ the product itself. I’ve read enough this past week, and spent enough time on it now to feel pretty confident about the ins and outs. But rather, I haven’t settled on what place Plus have in my online life? How am I actually going to use Google+?

I use this blog as an aggregated presence for other venues, and the odd post. Tumblr is for nonsense and lulz. I use Posterous to curate social data and visualisations. Delicious I use (still) as my online memory and as a retrieval system for mostly professional information. Twitter is for networking and discovery. I’ve kept Facebook a completely secluded island for family and ‘actual’ friends, whereas LinkedIn is my online Rolodex. And I take far more than I give on Digg, Fark, Reddit or StumbleUpon but generally speaking they all serve the exact same role, that of continuous discovery of online content.

The point being is that I have over the years carved out some pretty clear roles on what I use certain social networks/platforms for. And though my online attention is quite literally scattered across the web, it all actually seems to work for me.

So back to Google+ then. Is it meant to replace Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter? Or complement them?

The main advantage as I see it for Google+ in their long term adoption is that there are more Google users than Facebook users, and people still spend an awful lot of time using their products in a given day (though more on Facebook). So it’s not the case that people are going to leave other networks completely, though some might, but as All Facebook pointed out:

The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.

Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why.

On reflection, I easily spend far more time on using Google products (watching clips on YouTube or reading Google News alone) than I do on Facebook in a given week.  And that doesn’t even take into account my complete and utter reliance on Google for search or Gmail as my primary personal address since 2004. Add to that my more recent conversion to Reader and long overdue defection from Firefox to Chrome and on paper, I’m pretty heavily entrenched in Google. I’m far more reliant on Google products than I am on Facebook and if the revolution were to come tomorrow and I had to chose sides, I’d be team Google all the way.

Which is why I’m all the more perplexed as to why I’m not more fussed about using Google+ right now. Were there such a thing as a Google fanboy, I’d probably be one based on my description above, and by extension, I should be all over Google+.

But I’m just not.

Maybe time will tell on this one. As TechCrunch pointed out, “Google+ is more than a social product, or even a social strategy, it’s an extension of Google itself.” So eventually, I may just find myself using Google+, and so will everyone else.

But I haven’t seen nearly enough useful sharing of content from asymmetrical relationships for it to be as professionally useful as Twitter or LinkedIn. I primarily share things on Twitter over Facebook, and that will be a hard habit to break with the +1 button. And frankly, there aren’t enough of my actual friends on Google+ for it to be anything near ‘a new Facebook’ for quite some time.

Elsewhere, Sparks isn’t yet delivering on the potential for serving up interesting content to make me use it over Digg, Fark or Google News. But the idea behind this feature remains one of the things that interested me the most about Plus.

Part of me really wants to like and use Google+ . But at this stage it almost feels like I’m rooting for the underdog, even though that underdog just happens to be the second most valuable company on the planet.

So getting back to my original point, I am still a bit unsure of how I will be using Google+. I won’t give up on it just yet. But I’m going to be a bit more casual in my approach in the coming weeks and work it out as I go along. I trust in time it’s utility will become evident, or in my mind at least, it will fail.

But if anyone out there sees a big potential, or already has it figured out, please comment below!

Mark Zuckerberg Joins Google+

See Zuckerberg’s profile here. (Image via Buzzfeed)

Winklevoss twins file new lawsuit against Facebook

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who yesterday settled a long-running court case against Facebook for a not-too-shabby payout of £48 million, have filed a new lawsuit against the social network and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

The new case, filed in Boston, suggests that Facebook and Zuckerberg “intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence” in the recently-settled lawsuit.

Anyone else think these two should just @£%$* right off? (via TechRadar)

My tweet lord: Pope joins Twitter and launches new Vatican website

Pope Benedict XVI has tweeted for the first time, announcing the launch of a Vatican news information portal.

It’s the latest effort by the Vatican to bring its evangelising message to a greater, internet-savvy audience and follows forays into Facebook and YouTube.

Sent from an iPad; impressive. ‘Hide yo kids’.(via Guardian)

Facebook Helps Nab Boston Crime Boss Whitey Bulger

The Federal Bureau of Investigation captured infamous Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger thanks to a widespread publicity campaign that included Facebook.

Bulger, whose story was made famous by the Martin Scorcese film, The Departed, was nabbed in Santa Monica, Calif. along with his girlfriend Catherine Grieg a day after the communications effort kicked off.

Besides Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the FBI used more traditional media such as billboards in Times Square and public service announcements in 14 cities.

(via All Facebook)

James “Whitey” Bulger’s Neighbors React to FBI Arrest on Twitter

Several area residents living near The Princess Eugenie apartment complex on 3rd Street where Bulger was staying took to Twitter to post their reactions to his capture.

Click through to Mashable for many more examples of tweets and twitpics, each more desperate for attention than the next.

TwitPic founder Noah Everett tweets ‘naked’ arrest photo

TwitPic founder Noah Everett caused a stir early Wednesday morning after posting pictures of himself “getting arrested.”

“Getting arrested…in the back of a cop car now,” Everett tweeted, at about 2AM (EST), to his 2.8 million Twitter followers. This message was followed by, “Proof,” along with a link to a TwitPic photo of, yes, the inside of a police cruiser.

(via Digital Trends)

The White House and Obama to hold the first “Twitter Townhall”

The White House has just announced the 1st “Twitter @townhall” with President Obama to take place next week on Wednesday, July 6th. Followers will be able to #AskObama anything about the economy and jobs at askobama.twitter.com. Follow @Townhall to “listen into the conversation.”

(via The Next Web)

Super-injunction leaks drive over-50s to Twitter

Twitter’s UK audience jumped by a third in May 2011 following the super-injunction leaks about Ryan Giggs, which drove a huge number of female pensioners to the site, according to new data.

(via The Telegraph)

New Service Adds Your Drunken Facebook Photos To Employer Background Checks, For Up To Seven Years

The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online.

(via Consumerist)

DNA, Facebook pic lead to robbery suspect

Texas police said an alleged robber was arrested thanks to DNA from clothes abandoned after a crime and a Facebook photo of her in clothes from another robbery.

(via UPI)

Possible Prison Sentences For Anyone Campaigning On Twitter In Thailand On Election Day

Any Thai candidate or supporter caught campaigning on Twitter on the evening before the July 3rd election will face up to six months behind bars, according to officials.

Bloomberg reports that a police spokesman confirmed the possibly jail time, adding that campaigning after 6pm on the evening before an election is illegal.

(via All Twitter)

Facebook Hires Hacker George Hotz, IPhone And PlayStation 3 Jailbreaker

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em–or, in Facebook’s case, hire ‘em full time.

According to TechUnwrapped, Facebook now employs George Hotz, the young hacker who has drawn the legal ire of tech giants Apple and Sony.

(via Huffington Post)

Above is the third instalment of Erik Qualman’s Social Media Revolution video, an animated infographic packed full of social media statistics about global usage and key platforms. The video has been refreshed with up-to-date stats as of June 2011, no doubt rendering versions 1 and version 2 somewhat obsolete. Though it can be a really cheesy at times and the soundtrack is absolutely awful, the video is worth watching. At 4 minutes 19 seconds, this is the ‘long’ version.

One thing worth noting is that Qualman doesn’t appear to have sourced a lot of these statistics just yet. Granted, it’s hard to do in the video but the right place might have been in the blog posts accompanying this video’s launch (here and here) as he did with version 2.

I mention this because the first version of Social Media Revolution in 2009 came under some heavy fire for using duff stats, even while clocking up several hundred thousand views in the early days. This was my take on it at the time. For version 2, he addressed a lot of the criticism regarding factual accuracy by listing his sources and identifying his opinions. With version 3 though, it looks like a lot of the stats are once again unchecked.

So my advice for now would be to watch it, but maybe hold off on wheeling this out at the next training session.

Qualman is the author of the book Socialnomics and the blog that bears the same name.