Google+ is better than Facebook for 10 reasons

1. "Circles"

Overwhelmingly, Google+ users say they prefer Google+'s model for organizing your contacts. While Twitter allows you to "follow" others, and Facebook is all about mutual "friendship," Google+ instead introduces the concept of "Circles."

Circles are groups of friends with different labels such as "co-workers" or "family." Users can choose to share each update with a different group, and also view their incoming streams by group, rather than all at once. "I'm finding the circles help with keeping my life and work separate," explains Google+ fan Richard Walden.

2. Privacy

Google+ users say they find the service's privacy settings easier to use. This might be surprising given that Google+ profiles themselves cannot be private. However, thanks to Circles, it's easy to control which users can see each of your updates. "I want fine grained control of how my posts are shared," says Jen Delisle.

3. Longer, more thoughtful posts

Twitter might be king when it comes to brevity, but Ward Andersonsays he reads more insightful postings on Google+. This thoughtfulness is enabled by Google+'s higher character limit -- users can post multiple paragraphs of text, versus one or two sentences on Twitter.

4. No ads

Google+ users, including Dave Francis Rotaquio, say they love that Google+ is currently ad-free. With Facebook having run ads for years, and Twitter now ramping up its use of advertising, Google+ is now one of the few successful social networks that lacks commercial interruption.

However, the free lunch is unlikely to last forever: Google runs the largest ad network on the Web and may eventually have to face the economic realities of operating a large social site.

5. Group video chat

Want to video chat with up to 10 friends? With Google+, switching from a text chat to a group video conversation takes a click -- and it's one feature that Google's rivals lack. Facebook now supports video calls thanks to a deal with Skype, but group chatting isn't possible there.

What's more, Google just integrated this "Hangouts" feature into YouTube, letting you and your friends chat about videos while you watch.

6. Farmville-free

Google+ recently added games to its lineup -- a feature that's often cited as an annoyance on rival social networks. (Do you have a Facebook friend who can't help but post Farmville updates all day?)

Google+ makes its games less irritating, says Inniya Kim, by relegating all gaming updates to a dedicated tab -- this keeps your stream free from noisy distractions. So if Farmville were ever to come to Google+, few would consider it a pest.

7. Better photos

Some Google+ users say the network is becoming a leader in photo-sharing: Full-screen photo galleries and a highly active community consisting of some the Web's most popular photographers must surely have helped here.

8. Friendly staff

Who said social networks don't need great customer service? The creators of Google+ are active on the service themselves and use it to respond to questions and criticisms. Rob Michael feels this has made Google+ feel more collaborative.

9. Less clutter

Perhaps it's simply the lack of advertising, but many Google+ users say they like Google's clean, white aesthetic. On Google+, there's nothing to distract you from the content.

10. Integrated with Google products

Fans of Google's other services, such as Gmail and Google Calendar, say they like the way Google+ works across many of Google's existing products.

"They had everything else, for the most part, already working so all they needed was to add the social networking aspect to things," says Josiah Stone.

Perhaps the greatest selling point of Google+ is the most obvious, however: It's new. The opportunity to start afresh with an up-to-date list of friends, no spam, no ads and an uncluttered interface is a novel experience for those of us who have spent years maintaining profiles on other websites.

Whether that "new car feel" lasts -- especially for neophiles like me -- remains to be seen.

Copied from:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/08/23/google.plus.better.cashmore/index.html

Girl beats 200000 boys at Excel Comp

Rebecca, who is 15, was one of 228,000 competitors from 57 countries.




http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14401766

Why wait?

I've talked to many of my classes about the strange tradition the schools maintain: The idea that you wait until finishing school before you do something amazing, change the world or make a million dollars. Why wait to finish school? Here's 3 dropouts that did quite well:

The Harvard Crimson called him "Harvard's most successful dropout" — the rest of the world just calls him ridiculously rich. For more than a decade, Bill Gates has been one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, men in the world. The son of an attorney and a schoolteacher, Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973, only to drop out two years later to found Microsoft with childhood friend Paul Allen. In 2007, more than thirty years after he left Harvard, the co-founder of Microsoft would finally receive his degree (an honorary doctorate) from his alma mater. At the commencement, Gates said, "I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today." 

The Mac, the iPod, heck, even Buzz Lightyear probably wouldn't have existed had Steve Jobs stayed in school. The future wizard of One Infinite Loop dropped out of Reed College after just six months because of the undue financial strain it placed on his working-class parents' savings. He would go on to eventually found Apple, NeXT Computer and Pixar, becoming an instrumental force in shaping the landscape of modern culture. However, his brief tenure in academia was not for naught. In a 2005 commencement speech he gave at Stanford University, Jobs credited a calligraphy class he took at Reed College with forming the basis for the typography used in the first Macintosh computer.

Most college students use their dorm rooms to sleep, study, or do things their parents probably don't want to know about. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his. Originally meant only for Harvard students, the popular social networking site quickly spread to the rest of the Ivies and other colleges across the nation. As Facebook's popularity exploded, Zuckerberg packed up his bags and relocated the fledgling company to Palo Alto, California, forever leaving behind Harvard's hallowed halls. So far, the decision has worked out pretty well for the twenty-something. According to Forbes, Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world, with a 2010 net worth of $4 billion.

Firefox 5 and Extensions

I have been a Safari man for at least a couple of years now and went for it because it was a cleaner design. But Firefox 5's speed has drawn me back to it and with the "foxdie" Appearance plug-in it now looks like Safari but has then allowed me to add these useful extensions: Auto Hide Tabbar

1. Auto Hide Bookmark Bar
2. BugMeNot
3. DownloadThemAll
4. Flash Blocker
5. Twitter from address bar

New iOS Support WIKI

New iOS Wiki launched but in need of suggestions.
Please email me or comment on the blog with any APP suggestions that you think would be USEFUL at school. Give me examples of how you are using your iPod / iPhone / iPad in class or for prep.
http://collab.kings.net.nz/groups/iossupport/


r.wells@kingscollege.school.nz

iPod Magic!

I have mentioned that as a teenager, I was a party magician (It paid $200/hour!). Here, my 2 worlds collide:

Dare I say it...

...but LION's looking very cool indeed:

HTML+JS ON-THE-RUN

If you're really keen on coding and also maybe bored on the train? There's an App for that!
HTML Writer has coding shortcuts, its own testing browser, folder management and more. Get it HERE

PROGRAMMING 4 DUMMIES

SCRATCH is a good place to start from. It has nearly all the programming options you will ever play with. Children have used it to make fully functioning games. http://scratch.mit.edu/

STENCYL is like scratch but outputs into a FLASH GAME / PROGRAM: http://www.stencyl.com/

CATROID: A programming app for use on an Android phone - Program on the move! http://www.catroid.org

Android App Inventor

An online drag and drop app developer for beginner programmers. 

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com

The world of App development

Apple gets developer momentum as Android fragments, survey finds:

App developer interest is shifting back toward Apple as fragmentation and "tepid" interest in current Android tablets chips away at Google's recent gains in momentum, according to a new survey of more than 2,700 developers around the world.

Newsflash! Mr Wells finally gets excited about Gaming!

$15 will now sort out my Gaming world for good. All 80's Atari games are coming to iOS: http://goo.gl/wlg3s and if you're really keen you can get the arcade accessory! (pictured)

Buy the rest of Atari’s Entire Library in 2 unique ways:
1. 25 separate packs available for download at $0.99
2. Buy all 100 games for a discounted price of $14.99

A MAC APP ARCHIVE

Oh how lucky you are! The original Photoshop was 470k! And looked like MS Paint. I've found a site that is archiving old Mac apps which you can still download and run in emulators. Visit http://www.macintoshgarden.org/apps/ and have a look at how it used to be.

Computer Security

Something talked about a lot these days but actually applied by few is computer security. In this modern age of technology, malicious software on the web are aplenty, and all of them can get to your computer, and that means your personal information and other sensitive data, very easily if you don't have security software installed. Most people on the web are not protected; no wonder botnets can get up to millions in size. One common excuse is that these programs are too expensive - this is not true since there are many effective free versions that do the job. However, instead of buying and installing just a single piece of software, you will need to find and gather multiple different programs to rival the features of a paid security suite. Here's a collection that I use, one that I and many other users consider equivalent or even better in features and effectiveness than most paid softwares. Best of all, they're all free.

Courtesy nrupentheking.blogspot.com

• Avast! Free Antivirus (main antivirus)
• Comodo Firewall (firewall)
• Spybot Search and Destroy (spyware blocker and remover)
• Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus specialising in eliminating rootkits)

Remember to update these programs as regularly as possible, and also remember to update other programs on your computer - security patches are critical to eliminating vulnerabilities. Also, check Windows Update once in a while for security patches, efficiency tweaks, fixes and the like.

Oh, and to anyone who thinks someone going onto your Facebook account after you tell people your password and don't expect them to pass it around or use it, ...well it isn't. Here's how you ACTUALLY hack something like Facebook. http://nrupentheking.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-to-hack-facebook-account-all.html. By the way, this is just to show you that when people say hack, it actually means hack. I am NOT in any way suggesting that you should actually try hacking into personal or organisational accounts of any nature. It is illegal, and you can be prosecuted for doing it.

Browsers

For those using Google Chrome, try to fit it out with some apps. It'll make your experience of Chrome a whole lot better. As you may or may not know, the all new web-based Chrome OS is based heavily on the browser, so it makes sense that you can do pretty much everything you want within the browser (as long as you have a steady internet connection, of course). One app I would recommend is "Feedly", which is an app that displays a customizable cover page with updates on blogs, news sites and other web pages of your choice, every time you start up the browser. It also displays previews of articles shown in the app when you click on the headlines, helpful if you don't want to keep clicking "back" or opening and closing tabs.

                                                                                                                       Courtesy www.thefunnyads.com

Also, if you've tried Chrome and it isn't for you, another popular and highly recommended browser is the newly released Firefox 4. The only differences between the two that I've noticed are the interface and ease of use. And even these don't differ much between the two. From my personal experience, Chrome offers a slightly more geek orientated interface while Firefox is slightly easier to use for those of us who aren't all that tech-savvy. Also, Firefox features many features built-in, including some that can't be found in Chrome, while you need to spend hours installing apps to get Chrome to become "fully featured". Note that you can install "apps" or "add-ons" for both browsers.