College Online Cources

It’s been a week for peering into the future and wondering what we’ll be doing online.

Google+ is the search giant’s latest attempt to drive its tanks onto Facebook’s lawn and wipe the smile off founder Mark Zuckerberg’s face.

After a selective release to 200,000 opinion-formers, Google+ has had a successful first few days. The new social networking tool’s uncanny resemblance to Facebook has been much commented on but not much criticised.

And its most eye-catching feature, the ability to group friends into ‘Circles’ to aid sharing what you want with who you want, has been praised as if Facebook didn’t already let its users create Groups of friends, with just the same effect.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones was impressed with a Google+ feature called Hangout, which lets you set up a group video chat with friends – or, in Rory’s case, with four members of the Google press team. “It seemed to work pretty well,” he concluded. (Questions would no doubt have been asked in Google PR circles if he had thought otherwise after so much staff attention.)

Elsewhere, you could take you pick of reactions to Google+: 

- Five Reasons Why Google+ Will Succeed

- Five Reasons Why Google+ Will Fail

- 9 Reasons to Switch from Facebook to Google+

- 4 Reasons Google+ Will Be The Next Big Thing (and 1 Reason it Won’t)

The last, by Manchester SEO specialist Andrew Nattan, gets to the point with its one negative for Google+:

What’s more, Facebook is a moving target. This week one of its executives was telling a conference in New York about its plans to make choosing what to watch a more sociable experience.

Cory Bergman reported on Lost Remote (‘all about social TV’):

And there are rumours of another big announcement from Facebook next week.  

Rupert Murdoch has gone against the grain in his predictions about the future of newspapers with his paywall strategy for the Times. But this week NewsCorp reported that after a year of the paywall, it had more than 100,000 subscribers. PaidContent turned that into hard cash (with excited bold for emphasis):

Former Times journalist George Brock put the figures into context, pointing out that subscription is only one side of the new business model:

It sounds like a plausible business idea, but then (and I know this is a cheap shot) so did paying $580 million for the social network MySpace seven years ago. And this week Mr Murdoch bowed out of that new business, with a humiliating £35 million sale.

Today, if you want to predict the way things are going, ask the crowd.

That’s what technology writer John Battelle is doing as he embarks on a book that aims to tell us how the world will be in 2040. He’s planning to share his thoughts with the readers of his blog, and believes their feedback will help, as it did on his last book, about Google: ”If I get half the feedback for this book that I got for the last one, I’ll consider myself a lucky man.”

So will it be Google+ or Facebook by 2040? I’m not sure Battelle will come down on that question, but he has got some interesting thoughts about decisions we’re already making – consciously or not:

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