What you should know about Google+ so far (The Cutline)

Your average Google+ user (Paul Sakuma/AP)

Google+ has been with us for a little more than a week, and with a limited number of invites out, much of the coverage in the tech press so far is understandably heavy on speculation about its eventual impact. (Katy Watson, a Google representative, told The Cutline that the company has yet to release its user data for external news outlets.) But user numbers aside, the site has made a clear splash, at least in the world of geek culture. Below is a run-down of early reviews and observations on the service

• The customer base for Google+ is overwhelmingly male

The service's following so far is heavily male--88 percent, compared to 10 percent women, and 2 percent who did not supply gender information--according to SocialStatistics.com, which is surveying users of the new service and ranking the top 100 according to number of followers.

When The Cutline talked to Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, who previously founded Twitter Counter and TheNextWeb, he said users of the service seem principally focused on finding people to follow, rather than amassing circles of their own friends. "As in the early days of Twitter everybody is looking for people to follow," van Zanten said. "So it makes sense to start with a few famous people to get a feel for what they are doing." As of this morning, SocialStatistics was indexing more than 9,000 users and adding one account every two seconds.

And who is the top followed user? As Alexia Tsotisis of Tech Crunch notes, it's none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who gained over 21,000 followers on the 4th of July alone.

• Google is capitalizing on being the nice guy

Over at The Atlantic, James Fallows says the potential success of Google+ is linked to Google's corporate reputation. "Google errs and oversteps and can seem threateningly large, but in the end it acts as if it has a conscience," writes Fallows. He points to an essay by Michael Luna, where Luna argues that Google's political stands have smoothed his own transition from other social-networking sites into the search behemoth:

Google is currently in a power war with China.... It took a stand, and now it's fighting the Chinese government more strongly on issues of freedom of information and security than any major company I'm aware of.

Another user benefit that early adopters report favorably on is the ability to immediately pick not just your friends, but which "circle of sharing" they will inhabit on the service. Such positive early reviews could mean that the service's largest rival, Facebook, is starting to look anxiously over its shoulder. The tech site Mashable reported yesterday that the company was blocking a browser extension that would allow users to extract Facebook contacts for use in other services.

• Google+ is driving traffic

For journalism, the big promise of social media has always been the (relatively) free distribution of content. Joshua Benton argued convincingly back in April that to understand how well a publication was doing  it was helpful to look at the number of stories being shared. (In his example, Benton logged how often stories from Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only publication The Daily appeared on Twitter)

Tech Crunch reported yesterday that Google+ had already become one of the top 10 sites referring users back to the popular technology news site, only one week into its launch. "The amount of inbound traffic we're seeing from Google+ is pretty crazy considering that we're not even officially using it to share links yet," writes MG Siegler. "On both Facebook and Twitter we send out links to our followers and this leads to most of the click-backs (either directly or by re-sharing). On Google+, we're not doing anything yet, it's all happening from others sharing our links organically."

However, site developers may not see the full effect of Google+ on brand building  until the launch of Google+ pages for businesses which is expected "in the near future," according to Google VP Jeff Huber.

• Group video is the killer app

Over at the Times, Jenna Wortham evangelizes for Google+'s "Hangout" feature, which streams multiple video feeds into a single space: "it was a fun, synchronous hangout time on the Internet not quite like anything I've ever experienced online." She stayed online in the chat until 3 a.m. sharing gifs and indulging in an impromptu videostreamed karaoke performance.

D.C. pundit Julian Sanchez echoed this positive appraisal of group videos in his review of the service, speculating that the informality of the chat rooms would allow for more spontaneous, casual conversations that might feel forced in a one-on-one service such as Skype, Apple's FaceTime, or Google Video Chat. "Everyone's more comfortable opening the channel and leaving it active because it's not making the same kind of demands as a phone call," Sanchez writes.

So what next for Google+? The service's real test will be how widely it's adopted beyond this early, discerning circle of tech ethusiasts. "So far google+ friending seems to be more about a shared present/future than a shared past" tweeted out Tomorrow Museum's Joanne McNeil (attributing the quote to Farrah Bostic). Building out yet another social network identity is going to be a hard sell for folks who don't already spend their days glued to a laptop. But with goodwill and snazzy tech, maybe the Google + evangelists can convince even the curmudgeons among us to join up.

Analyst thinks Apple should cut iPhone 3GS cost to $0 in September (Appolicious)

Apple’s iPhone is performing well in all its forms for being a single device that recently doubled the number of cellular providers carrying it – to two. But Apple’s iOS platform has nothing on Google’s Android, an operating system that currently dominates the market with better than 50 percent of the smartphones on the market running it.

It’s tough to keep up with Android simply because Apple’s iOS system is limited. The company can’t expect the iPhone to compete with all manner of Android phones, from top-tier to entry level and mid-range. Or can it? One analyst thinks that Apple not only can compete with lower-cost Android phones, but that the company is planning a pricing move in September to do just that.

According to a story from Forbes, RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky says he expects Apple to drop the price of the iPhone 3GS to nothing with a two-year contract from AT&T this fall. That’s when Apple is expected to roll out the iPhone 5 (or at least some new generation of its smartphone), and Abramsky thinks a price tag of free could help Apple seriously capitalize on users who are interested in the iPhone but for whom cost has been a limiting factor.

Here’s a quote from the Forbes story:

‘As its entry-level iPhone strategy, Apple is expected to cut iPhone 3GS to $0 (on contract, $399 unsubsidized) in conjunction with iPhone 5 launch,’ Abramsky writes in a research note. ‘This approach is intended to target mid-market smartphone buyers and counter Android’s mid-market expansion.’

A proprietary study from RBC Capital states that a free iPhone 3GS “would double the company’s global market opportunity and re-accelerate iPhone share growth outside of North America,” according to the Forbes piece. Abramsky also expects the iPhone 4 to drop to $99 with a contract in September, and the iPhone 5 to start at $199 on contract.

Can we expect two iPhones in September?

And while we’re talking about markets that the iPhone could expand into given the right circumstances, it’s worth mentioning a rumor one analyst chucked out into the ether recently stating that he thought Apple would break out two iPhones in September – one, a scaled-back, unlocked model called the iPhone 4S, and the other the true design revamp, the iPhone 5.

A few outlets around the Internet reacted negatively to the story, and it sounded like bunk to us too. After all, analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank didn’t really have any “facts” to back up his “rumor” of two iPhones. But another analyst, Horace Dediu of Asymco, raises a good point: There are far more prepaid cellular phone users out there in the world than on contracts, and Apple isn’t really serving any of them.

Apple does offer a few unlocked iPhones that can be placed on any carrier, but Dediu writes that there’s still 70 percent of the cellular phone market worldwide that Apple isn’t reaching:

Roughly 1.5 billion [phone users] are post-paid and 3.7 billion are pre-paid. That means that nearly 70% of the world is not being addressed by the iPhone as it currently stands. Put another way, a shift in positioning might result in a 250 percent increase in addressable market.

So maybe all these analysts aren’t too far off the mark when they suggest that Apple might be planning to make some changes with its mobile strategy. It would certainly help in the fight against Android, in which Apple is staying relatively steady but not gaining much ground.

Yudhoyono: World Should Prevent Economic War

Yudhoyono: World Should Prevent Economic War

"The next economic war or conflict can be over the race for scarce resources"

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at World Economic Forum 2011 (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned that the next economic war could be over scarce resources if problems of rising food prices, poverty and population growth remain unresolved, according to the World Economic Forum website.

Addressing participants at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Yudhoyono noted recent increases in food and energy prices, citing FAO predictions that food prices have reached 2008 levels and could still go up. High food prices have an impact on inflation and on poverty and unrest, and could lead to social and political unrest, he said in Davos yesterday.

Meanwhile, world population is reaching 7 billion this year and could top 9 billion by 2045. “Over half are in Asia. Imagine the pressure on food, energy, water and resources,” Yudhoyono pointed out, adding, “the next economic war or conflict can be over the race for scarce resources, if we don’t manage it together.”

The president of the world’s third largest democracy described the post-crisis recovery as “sluggish and uneven,” citing continued concerns over European sovereign debt, fiscal deficits and the restructuring of the financial sector. In particular, rising unemployment could increase domestic tensions and reignite protectionism. “We have some distance to go and much to do to reach our common objective of strong, sustainable and balanced growth,” he stressed. Yudhoyono saw major strategic shifts in the new world reality.

One of these shifts is the rise of emerging economies, most of which are in Asia. By one estimate, the region will account for 45% of the world’s total GDP and one-third of world trade by the end of this decade. “I will let the pundits debate whether we are on the threshold of an ‘Asian Century’. Whatever you call it, one thing is indisputable: Asia is undergoing a rapid and strong economic, social, cultural and strategic resurgence – the sum of which is certain to redefine global affairs,” he said.

He also warned against complacency in tackling security issues. This is because old conflicts and flashpoints persist and non-traditional security threats are gaining centre stage. Diseases, natural disasters and terrorism continue to kill millions and rack up losses. “The bomb at the Russian airport three days ago reminded us that terrorism will continue to haunt us,” Yudhoyono said.

The president added that in the new reality, no single power can shape the world order alone. “To resolve the issues of our time, nations must come to common terms and find shared norms. The concerted efforts by G20 countries to avert the Great Depression in 2008 and 2009 attest to this,” he said.