The weekend was very productive, both in terms of getting stuff down around the house and my current side project/venture which I'll write more about later this week. I'm a little slower than normal getting going this morning as a result though so this will be another short/scatter shot entry.
Topic one is Google+; which is now open to the general public. On the plus side Google has been growing rapidly since the flood gates opened. In theory people are still required to use their real names. On the downside, I've seen several apparently real names posting random spam to topics with little or no relationship to the topic of the spam. Google does provide a button to report bad posts. It's unclear to me what effect that has though and the quality of discussion is certainly down since the flood gates have opened. Google is going to need some better spam controls in place ASAP if they don't want to annoy their existing user community. Their email filters are amazingly good, so hopefully they'll get something similar in place on Google+ soon. A growth of ten million plus users in this first week is good, but they'll need to have sustained growth if they want to challenge Facebook
On another Google+ related note Klout now supports Google+. I'm kind of excited about that as my level of engagement on Google+ tends to be high which should help my score. It's not that Klout defines who I am but it's nice to have it measuring pretty much everything I do online at this point. I gave up on Peer Index awhile back since they never seemed to be able to fix the problems with my profile. The forty point mark seems to be a magic value that a lot of Klout perks require. I've been hovering just below it for the past week or so. Hopefully this week is the week I push above and maintain at least that level.
I'll round things out with a rumor that Apple is cutting production of the iPad 2 and thinking of a price cut. My initial reaction is that this doesn't sound all that credible. Thinking about it a bit though it could be true. Even the base model isn't cheap, particularly when compared to small laptops that do a lot more but don't have the Apple logo. At this point the early adopters and Apple enthusiasts should all own an iPad so we're getting to the point where a drop in price might be needed to sustain sales. The other alternative would be introducing a new version and there have been rumors of that for awhile. I don't think we'll see a new iPad until next spring though.
Image via Wikipedia
Here's a link to an article that appears to shed more light on the Apple rumor I mentioned at the bottom of this post...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/27/apples_ipad_2_build_plans_still_well_above_expectations.html
It's essentially saying that production and sales are still expected to be well ahead of what analysts were expecting.