Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

Do you see Facebook consistently beating Google as the most-visited site? Comments welcome.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

But shouldn’t we also look at all the new sites coming up fast – and not forget established ‘older’ ones? eBay for example or Twitter being two of them. Service websites like Pix2Press will undoubtedly grow over the next years to come and revolutionize the way how photo or video media is distributed to newspapers, magazines or TV. If sites like Pix2Press combine their powers with social networking sites, we have Millions of photographers feeding the world-wide media. Back this up with Twitter – there is no place to hide for any celebrity.

Comments welcome.

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting,” announced Google Gmail and Buzz product manager Todd Jackson. “It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.”

“We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences),” he continued “Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

Are you convinced? I suspect, like me, you’re reaction is along the lines of kinda, sorta, not really.

Making matters a little better are Buzz’s open API and the fact it post updates to Twitter though not call in tweets from those you follow), while there’s support for Flickr along with Google products Picasa, Reader, Blogger and YouTube. Vitally, however, dominant forces Facebook and Wordpress are ignored completely as is – rather strangely – its own social network Orkut (wildly popular in Brazil, ignored virtually everywhere else). Furthermore, it is extremely presumptuous on Google’s part to assume I want to automatically follow people I email regularly from Gmail. After all, these days email is often more reserved for work than play given the dominance of Twitter and Facebook – so hold your horses Google.

Lastly, and this is a biggie: isn’t all this functionality and much, much more meant to be performed by Google Wave?! Wave is founded around real time sharing, collaboration and exchange, so why not simply merge Wave functionality into Gmail. This makes even more sense given that the general reaction to Wave so far has praised the theory, but questioned the logic of having yet another inbox to check and no friends to collaborate with. Merging with Gmail fixes both those flaws.

Ultimately, my first reaction to Buzz is this is Google’s iPad: fairly interesting on the surface, but I’m not sure there’s a market or a demand for it…

Comments welcome…

Google Wave is widely being regarded as revolutionary and is expected to become the new must have application for this brave new internet of everyone knowing everything about you and everyone else being told, whether they care or not.  Most likely, they don’t. Which is why Google Wave provides the new benchmark in pointless nonsense we don’t want to read.

Having been included in a number of Waves we have so far struggled to grasp one nugget of anything even remotely resembling useful information.  Typical nonsense includes “Can you read this?”, “Wow this is so cool” or “OMG LOL ROFL LMAO TBH IMHO ETC BLAH YADA”.  The only thing I get from Google Wave is that it has potential to be a very useful tool.  But it won’t be.

It will instead be hijacked by people hell bent on telling you a lot of stuff you don’t want to know, or telling you a lot of stuff that just doesn’t matter.  Google Wave is not the application for people who care about significant things because they will be disappointed with what will turn out to be a new way of passing on the same old jokes.

Google Wave will do for email what DVD did for the movie publishers.  When you bought the Blues Brothers on VHS it was great, really funny actually.  But then you bought it on DVD, the same bloody film but this time it’s on a disc.  Well that was a waste of ten quid wasn’t it.  Google Wave will bring us wave after wave after rehashed wave of the same old crap we’ve receiving and deleting for a decade.

Revolutionary?  No, just another way to get p****d off with those people who only exist on your Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/MSN/Email spam ring.  Enjoy.

Thanks, Band of Slugs

We used Tweety in the Google Wave sandbox preview and it works just fine. Perfect for all you new Google Wave users. If you need a manual, you can find it on our site, whytwitter.

So let’s do it, with pictures.

Go to your contacts window and click the + sign at the bottom to add a new contact:

Enter this address:

tweety-wave@appspot.com

Now make a new wave. Click the + symbol to add a new participant to it. Add Tweety:

Next you’ll get an authenticating message:

A new window will open to connect Wave to your Twitter account:

After you sign in successfully, you’ll get a message confirming this, and then the window will close.

Back in your wave, push the “Done” button if you’re still seeing the authentication message. Then you will see this:

Enter your tweet into the top box (first arrow in the screenshot) and push update to send. Keep in mind that it won’t count down the 140 characters. If you go over 140 characters, Google Wave won’t warn you.

Below the tweet box, you’ll see tweets from others (second, lower arrow in the screenshot). You might try reloading the page, if it looks like the names of those tweeting aren’t showing up correctly.

Happy tweeting within Google Wave. Comments welcome and please re-tweet at @why_tweat

Please bookmark our site here, we are sure you want to know about the new TwitFilter when it becomes available.

To clear up the confusion,  you are invited to the recently published Google Wave: A Complete Guide, a feature-length article that explains Wave in plain English.

Now whytwitter is supporting Gina Trapani and Adam Pash a step further as they are releasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The book, which is available for free online through whytwitter, details all of Wave’s features – and some use cases – in 8 chapters. It’s a super-handy reference if you’re still stuck on how to get the most out of Wave. Recommended!

Important! If you wish to have access to the complete google wave guide, refresh this page and fill in the form.

If you wish to be invited to Google Wave, refresh this page and fill in the form.

Proudly presented by whytwitter.

Time to talk about Google Wave – or the Google Tsunami in a different way. By no means get us wrong, there is a point to it. Even a good one. What did scare us, especially our marketing people — How deep does Google dig?

Consequently:

“Why Google Wave is dangerous”

IF you are fortune enough to get a “Google Wave Invite” – you face the following:

• You don’t know what to do with it – Resolved. Click here
• You will be worried instantly – Once ‘activated’ – you look at accounts you haven’t seen in years. Old contacts, superseded relationships, oh dear – where is Panic Button (or ‘where is the delete button?’)
• You consider changing your email account from Google (They know too much)
• You switch your computer and your phone off. – Just in case.

So what is all the Google Tsunami or Google Wave all about?

Google Wave, announced at Google’s I/O Developer conference in San Francisco, is a hybridized email system – (Ha, ha – you google this) that will fundamentally change the way we think about electronic messaging. This is foreboding for at least five reasons. (Below, a Google Wave or Google Tsunami in action.) Joke aside, this is how it loks like and works:

1) Participating in a Wave is a little like an email chain, and a little like instant messaging; you can embed documents, Google Web Elements, photos and other multimedia, all is presented as one stream of conversation. People can jump in or jump out at any time, and they can track back to see how a conversation got started.

The advantage, Google says, is “rich formatting.” But this “formatting” is also a lot like instant message formatting. We all know what that will mean: short, declarative sentences; loss of all punctuation, greetings, and email signatures (with important info like phone numbers??); and conversations that are much longer than they should be.

2) “With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” That’s what Google says. Are we are the only ones who write an email, then revise it for tone and clarity? It’s creepy enough that other people know when we are typing on Gtalk. Now they can see what we are thinking as we try out sentences?

whytwitter google wave gadgets

3) Every college student is familiar with the next liability. Email chains–the closest thing to waves at this point–are all fun and games until someone CC’s the wrong person, like a parent, relative, boss or overly-sensitive co-worker. “Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process,” Google says. That’ll make keeping track of participants a lot harder. Subtract the aforementioned opportunities to self-edit, and you have a social “train-wreck” ready and waiting.

4) Google Wave, like all fun new toys on the Internet these days, has its own API, aspiring to be a platform as well as a tool. It has “robots” that enable live functions like searching, linking and translation, and a wave can be embedded in a site to make things more “collaborative,” according to Google.

Leaving aside spam for a second–which we believe is no trifle – what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across Europe, US and Asia? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile? Yes. But it can’t be controlled by a company who can “change and manipulate”.

5) The worst thing about Google Wave: We will all try it anyway! Google’s apps are roundly excellent, with the exception of maybe Picasa, which is shamed by Flickr. Why? We are curious how the Google Wave – we call it Google Tsunami now –  survived amidst a new, post-recession Google that cuts funding for pie-in-the-sky projects; obviously, Google really believes in it’s Wave, and the search engine.

Sometimes even the giant can be wrong.

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