Google has two previous dives into social media with less than stellar results. First there was Google Wave that failed to catch on and then there was Google Buzz which caused some uproar over privacy issues. The fact that you needed a G-Mail account to sign up for either of them didn’t help things as complaints of e-mail spamming popped up as well. Google built them both as a way to show people what videos and websites you were looking at. They launched this with full knowledge that both Twitter and Facebook already added things to make it easy to share your stuff. The thought at the time was that the Google brand would draw people over and they’d start using that instead. Clearly they were wrong.

With Google plus they may have finally learned their lesson. Instead of trying to go where the puck is and compete with Facebook on their own terms they’ve finally tried something new and predicted where the puck is going. Google Plus is for those who are less concerned about seeing pictures of “friends” you haven’t spoken to in years or people that want to stockpile as many “friends” as possible. Google plus is more about making your own website in an easy fun way. Instead of taking the Facebook model they’ve looked at what smaller up and coming sites like Stumble Upon and Justin.tv are doing and taken that to a whole new level.

By putting the idea of custom pages through Google out there they’ve set themselves up to be in a great position to take advantage of mobile media down the line. Surfing Facebook on your phone isn’t easy and if they don’t develop something to change that they’re going to be in trouble very soon especially now that Google Plus has put all your stuff in one place. Once they’ve established a custom website they’re only a step away from giving you a personalized custom app. If they can make a consumer based custom app program that’s easy to use they could very well find themselves at the top of the heap. It looks like that is the way they are heading and if Facebook is smart they’ve got one in development right along with them.

It seems like, after years of trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter, Google has finally found an entirely new foothold into social media that could get them a foothold into mobile media. What they need to do going forward is make sure people know they aren’t just doing “Facebook for Gmail,” as they’ve been criticized for doing in the past. If they are going to stick in the world of social media you could have a great new alternative to Facebook or Twitter advertising and if they fair well in mobile media it would make it a lot easier for small business to use mobile advertising.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/07/google-plus-for-businesses-brands.php

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/blogarticle/124431/Google-Plus-whelms-the-Internet/blog/The-Hashtag

http://technorati.com/technology/article/google-plus-vs-facebook/

Reduce File Sizes

1. See optimizing images for reducing image sizes.
2. Minify CSS and JS files. Use Google’s Closure Compiler for JS and ICEY for CSS.
3. Minify HTML files with HTML Tidy.
4. Reduce file size with using relative links including //subdomain.example.com instead of http://subdomain.example.com

Configure Apache and .htaccess

1. Disable ETags
2. Add future expires headers
3. Enable GZip Compression
4. Since 15% of users don’t have gzip due to proxies you can override that with gzip detection. See page 130 of “Even Faster Websites” for detailed description on solving this problem.

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