Is Google Plus overtaking Facebook?

In a word; probably.

But this certainly comes as no surprise. A lot of the social networking crazes die down with time, like MySpace and Digg did, with people losing interest in them as they run their course and fizzle out. The Google Plus and Facebook debate isn’t a new one, with experts having said that Facebook will run its course and be overtaken by Google Plus from about two years ago. And their prediction is slowly coming true.

Fewer and fewer people are signing up for Facebook and many of those who already have it have deactivated their accounts for various reasons. There was a time when Facebook was all the rage and it led without competition in the social network arena, with Twitter not even coming close to its popularity.

One of the major pros of Google Plus is its customizable news feed which allows you to select the news that you want to see – so you don’t have to see someone post a pre-workout selfie if you don’t want to. Since its launch in 2011, Google Plus has been through countless layout changes to arrive at what it is now. By choosing who you want in your circles, you are able to filter the content that you receive.

Facebook, however, is definitely not going to go out without a fight. Although its users have drastically declined over the past few years, its loyal fans don’t seem to desire any other site for sharing their lives with others. But when Facebook switched from having user Profiles to Timelines, many of its users lost their faith in the site.

It does basically come down to one’s own preferences though. Some think that Facebook is easy and simple to use and allows access to a huge user database. But others think that Google Plus is the better social medium, for its neater interface and simply because it is run by Google – which many consider to be less malevolent than Facebook in terms of privacy and security.

There are immeasurable comparisons between the two social sites. Experts are also now saying that Facebook could lose 80% of its users by 2017, which isn’t too far away. Facebook is losing is popularity with youngsters especially for its privacy risks and its tendency to evoke unwanted social drama. Many feel that it has become a bit of a burden to have. Google Plus was reported by Forbes to be trailing very closely to Facebook last year at number 2 of the most used social platforms, with YouTube at number 3. So only time will tell now as to whether Google Plus is really the next big thing in social networking.

Cinemagraphs – A new kind of (creative) photography

Take, for example, an image photographed expertly of a beautiful woman standing in the breeze. It’s a stunning shot and on looking at it, it becomes alive to you. But imagine if you could put some sort of life into it – and not just in a figurative sense – maybe with her hair or dress moving slightly. Cinemagraphs have made a way for that to be possible and are appearing all over the Net for their ingenuity in simplicity and their versatility.

Basically, cinemagraphs are still photos which have a small but repeated movement in them. They are usually made in GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format and give the viewer the impression of watching a video, when it is still actually an image. Usually, cinemagraphs are produced from a series of images or a video recording which are composed together using editing software making the image become an uninterrupted loop of continuous frames, giving the image movement between exposures. This is then perceived as the repeated motion in the image.

Although GIF files have been around since the 80s, the vividness and clarity of cinemagraphs – and the term itself – is relatively recent. The term "cinemagraph" was coined by US photographers (and couple) Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck of Ann Street Studio in Manhattan, New York, who used the technique to animate their fashion and news photographs in early 2011.

The photographers collaborated in 2009, after years of friendship, and were married in 2012. Their passion for photography and stirring emotion from images brought them together. Some of their most beautiful cinemagraphs are those of model Coco Rocha and their clients so far have included Google, Donna Karan, Tiffany & Co., Veuve Clicquot, Rachel Zoe, and Oscar de la Renta among others.

Cinemagraphs have managed to capture beauty, glamour and fantasy in an image. Granted cinemagraphs cannot be printed, but that makes this kind of photography all the more a unique digital art form. Cinemagraphs now incorporate two of the most affecting forms of documentation, film and photographs, into one stunning package.

Google Glass – The future is here, or at least around the corner

If you thought that there couldn’t be any more tech gadgets to surprise you and leave you a bit flabbergasted, think again. Enter Google Glass. Google Glass is a wearable computer using an optical head-mounted display that is being developed by Google within their plan Project Glass, with a mission of producing a “mass-market ubiquitous computer”. Yes, that does sound like a term from an ominous sci-fi movie.

Google Glass displays information in a smartphone manner with a hands-free design that can interact with the wearer using voice commands. The frames do not have lenses fitted to them at the moment, but Google is considering partnerships with sunglass retailers like Ray-Ban and may also open retail stores to allow customers to try on the device. The Explorer Edition cannot currently be used by people who wear prescription glasses, but Google has confirmed that Glass will soon be able to be attached to prescription lenses. 

Glass is still very much a prototype, even after 8 months of testing and developing. The first thing noticed about Glass is the cube-shaped glass prism that sits above the right eye. It has a 640 x 360 resolution and hangs just out of the way of the wearer's line of sight. For the wearer, the display has to be viewed by pointing the eyes up and to the right – which possibly could look strange and cause major headaches – and acts as a much larger screen; one that's equal to a 25-inch High Definition television.

There are about 8 thousand "Explorers" currently – a group of engineers, scientists, artists, and journalists in the U.S. – who were allowed to buy and test Glass for about $1500, about R15 000. At the Glass office in New York, they got a crash course on how to connect Glass to the Internet, take videos, snap photos, get directions, perform Google searches, return e-mails, make calls, and much more. And all this using just your voice with an instruction that begins with “Okay, Glass.”

Google Glass is still in its developmental stage but is expected to be released in the latter part of 2014. But don’t get too excited. The cost of Glass is likely to be pretty exorbitant until Google finds a way to mass produce it and make it accessible to those masses. And that’s not the only downside to Glass. This could potentially be one of the most disruptive pieces of technology to be invented in current years and has also become a regular subject in legal circles around the U.S. But whatever may come of Google Glass, the development of the technology is fascinating and mind-boggling and will most likely become “ubiquitous” just as Sergey Brin and his Google guys want it.

The guys who give us Google – Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt

The names Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin, Lawrence "Larry" Page and Eric Emerson Schmidt might not be familiar to you but the name Google definitely is. The Internet unquestionably changed the way we see the world, pun intended, but Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies, gave us access to that world.

Sergey Brin is a Russian-born computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google. As of 2013, his personal wealth was approximated to be $24.4 billion. Presently Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company. He emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union as a child and later obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying Mathematics and Computer Science. After graduating, he enrolled in Stanford University, one of the most-renowned universities in the States, to acquire a PhD in Computer Science. There he met Larry Page, not knowing that their friendship would give the world one of the best inventions of all time.

Larry Page was born in Michigan, in the U.S. A lot like Brin, Page’s father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1965 when the field was still new and being built. Today he is considered a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. Both he and Page's mother, Gloria, were Computer Science professors at Michigan State University. Page obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan with honours and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University. As of 2013, Page's personal wealth is estimated to be $20.3 billion, ranking him number 13 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans.

At university, Brin and Page had filled their dormitory room with cheap computers and used a system created by Brin to build a superior search engine. The program became extremely popular at Stanford and they put their PhD studies on hold to start Google in a rented garage. Google began as a privately held company in 1998 with their mission statement being "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan being "Don't be evil". Brin and Page were really legends from the very beginning.

Eric Schmidt came onto the Google scene a little later. He is an American software engineer who is currently the Executive Chairman of Google. Forbes ranked Schmidt as the 138^th richest person in the world with an estimated wealth of $8.3 billion in 2013. He attended Princeton University where he started as an Architecture major but switched majors to earn a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1976. Initially, Schmidt was recruited by Brin and Page as Google’s CEO but in January 2011, Google announced that he would step down but continue as the Executive Chairman of the company and act as an adviser to co-founders Page and Brin. Page replaced Schmidt as the CEO of Google in April 2011.

These guys, who have given the world something that most people would not be able to live without, started off with a dream and lots of hard work. Page had said in an interview that from a very early age he realized that he wanted to invent things. So he became really interested in technology and business. And from when he was 12 years old, he knew that he was going to start a company eventually. Who could’ve known that that company would be Google? Today, Google is perhaps one of the largest and most important Internet corporations and probably will be for a long time to come. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), an office suite (Google Drive), and social networking (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS for the netbook known as a Chromebook. A small start in a rented garage became all this. Never curse the day of small beginnings.