When Google+ started, it created raves around the Internet. But after the initial novelty died down, many people moved on from the network due to a lack of interest.

Initially, Google+ was open only by invitation. As curiosity tends to lead you on, many users eagerly joined the social network. But when the website did open up to the public, its user base declined significantly.

Many industry experts have said that Google+ is about to come to a stand still as there is hardly any activity on the website by users. Popular features like +1 are rarely used anymore.

But today, just under a week before its release; Shah Rukh Khan went to promote his upcoming mega-budget film Ra.One using Google + Hangouts. As the word spread about SRK going live on Google+, many users headed back to their accounts and were interacting with the actor on his page.

Hangouts is an innovative feature by Google+ which lets users have a web conferencing experience with their friends. The Hangout by Shah Rukh Khan that started at 3 P.M. IST today was filled to capacity from the very beginning. Many users complained that they could not access the page because of over capacity issues.

India is one of Google’s biggest markets with over 86 million active Internet users. If Google+ manages to keep the country’s users interested in their network, it could easily help them sustain themselves in the market for a long time to come.

Though other social networks have used celebrities to promote themselves in the past, the move by Google+ takes the promotion to a more personal level.

Looking at the success Google+ received with today’s event, many competitors will soon be turning their heads towards bringing in celebrities to promote their own websites, thus making the war of the social networks more intense than ever.

Will Google+ witness a subsequent rise in its user base with this new introduction? We’ll have to wait and watch.

Ra.One releases worldwide in theatres on 26th October and stars Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Rampal.

The website lets users post messages, follow other users and share links on their network. The interface of the whole network is similar to Twitter in many ways.

Some of the most striking similarities between Twitter and ZaraBol are the use of Hashtags, following people and a 140 character limit for posting messages. Other similar features include ‘Sab Ko bol‘, which lets users broadcast other’s messages similar to ‘retweeting’ on Twitter.

The only slight difference that ZaraBol offers is a feature that lets users follow trending topics. Another feature on the website lets users divide messages into streams. Users can either view messages from everyone using the ‘All’ tab, or view messages posted by them and the people they follow via the ‘Me+I Follow’ tab.

This is not the first venture of Rediff into the microblog market. Earlier, they had acquired Vakow.com, a mobile based social platform. But the merger was of no use for Rediff and they had to move on.

Rediff has been staggering from quite a while and this new move might help direct slight amount of traffic on their website. But looking at the mostly negative comments on the portal, ZaraBol will have to enhance their features to maintain user interest.

Statistics show that Twitter users churn out close to 250 million tweets a day. Costolo claims that the site has become immensely popular because of its user friendly interface and the fact that Twitter has refrained from adding a lot of new features on their portal.

“We think we can reach every person on the planet, we think the way to do that is to simplify it. Over time, Google+ and Facebook will be more and more different than the experience we want to pass onto our users.” ,

Costolo said.

The website has over a 100 million active users around the world. Out of these, more than half of the users log into their accounts everyday. Twitter has been growing rapidly in terms of user activity as well. While Twitter took 3 years and 2 months to reach 1 billion tweets, it now only takes about four to five days to reach the same number.

Many developers have come up with third party applications for Twitter which has helped the network attract more users. Among these applications, Costolo said that the new iOS 5 has helped Twitter grow significantly. The new OS upgrade by Apple lets users integrate many of their day to day activities with Twitter.

“We looked at the chart after the first day, we all anticipated that it would be big but we think it’ll be better than we thought it was. We have lofty ambitions, we want to be part of the fabric of every communication in the world.”,

he said.

But there was a slight downer for investors who had been waiting for Twitter to go public. Dick Costolo said that the company does not intend to go public in the near future thanks to their current profits.

With the growing popularity of social media, the war for the top position in the social networking world has become intense. It will be interesting to see how competitors Facebook and Google + react to this news.

Facebook is currently one of the most popular social networks in the world. Realizing the potential that it’s huge member base has for offer, many brands around the world try to mark their presence on the website.

The study was carried out by Social Bakers, one of the biggest social media statistic providers in the world. In the statistic, it can be seen that among 100 global brands, close to 25 Indian brands have strong engagement with their fans on the social network.

Pages were ranked under four main categories: Engagement, Number of Fans, Quality of Page and Content. Under these, 30 different parameters were used to filter the results.

On the lists of top ten brands, the first six happen to be Indian Brands. The popular Indian alcohol brand Kingfisher tops the list with 2,174,386 fans on the page followed by FMCG brand Bingo. TATA’s Docomo comes in at number three with a fan base of  3,889,952 fans.

MTV India has a fan base of 2,915,278 members which puts them at number four on the list. TATA’s Photon page with its 1,036,864 members and eBay India with 1,107,276 members stand at fifth and sixth place respectively. Another Indian brand, Shopper’s Stop, with 1,423,026 members is present at Number eight on the list.

There are a lot of pages who have a huge number of fans. But there is a severe lack of interactivity and quality content. This makes the brand communication ineffective as members are not active on the page.

With the results of this new report, many Indian brands will soon turn to Social media in order to gain a competitive edge over others.

The survey conducted by the Internet research wing of Pew showed that almost 65 percent of adult Internet users are active on social networks. This was a sharp rise from previous year’s 61 percent and almost twice as much as 2008 (29%).

On an average day, almost 43 percent of adults who browse through the Internet visit a social networking website. When a gender comparison was carried out, it was found that use of social networking sites among women had gone up significantly.

Mary Madden, one of the researchers wrote in the report,

“The pace with which new users have flocked to social networking sites has been staggering; when we first asked about social networking sites in February of 2005, just 8 percent of Internet users—or 5 percent of all adults—said they used them.”

Social networks in their attempts to have an advantage over their competitors have been making drastic changes on their interface to appeal to the users.

Till date, most of the social networks have done their best to be youth centric to target the ever growing youth market. With this new report, developers may need to look beyond teenagers to appeal to their entire user base.

On this note he hopes to address the outflow of personal user information from these sites to third party entities by putting forth a new legislation which secures user privacy. Executives at Facebook Inc. and MySpace Inc. are sporting furrowed brows as the Senate continues to bombard them with questions pertaining to the indicated breach in privacy.

Speaking of the same he quoted, “I intend to find out whether today’s social-networking sites are adequately protecting their users’ personal information. I fully intend to conduct oversight and formulate strong public policy that protects the privacy of American consumers.”

The executives at Facebook on their part claim to have incorporated measures to curb and block the flow of personal information to sources like unverified companies and advertisers. The website faces utmost pressure to put to action these reservations while juggling between serving its 500 million active users and attaining its share of revenue from advertisers.

When a user chooses to use applications or play games, he enters a spot of vulnerability in terms of his personal data. According to Rockefeller’s message to Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, the violation of the company’s privacy policy can be traced around more than 10 million users.

The questions asked were regarding the ones affected, the company’s privacy policy enforcement, the penalties imposed against violations and the steps partaken to avoid them.

In response to this, Facebook’s spokesperson Andrew Noyes commented, “The issue is caused by an inherent weakness in Web browsers, which automatically share information with visited websites.” He also assured that henceforth Facebook will encrypt user IDs and resolve the issue with Internet browsers. MySpace is yet reviewing the letter and is expected to dispatch a reply any time now.

The Zeus Trojan arrives at your LinkedIn doorstep through an email which prompts you to click on a link that promises to direct you to imaginary ‘pending’ messages. It ultimately redirects you to Google. What the virus does is robs you of all your essential data. It detects the browser in use, the applications running on your Windows and deposits the Trojan into any vulnerable fissure it comes across.  After the SOS alerts that notified people about this cyber crime, the bots are either lying low or have assumed some other form of wicked malware.

The magnitude of this attack was hypnotically large. On Monday the numbers suggested 1 of every 4 spam emails docked the Zeus Trojan. This episode smartly mocks the globe that social media is. There are other viral campaigns of the malicious kinds adopting a similar line of attack. Access LinkedIn through your browser rather than links planted in your email. Think twice before giving in to links that are suspicious even in the slightest proportions ‘cause in doing so you may just have given a criminal perched somewhere a leeway into your precious privacy.

Underestimating these bots wouldn’t quite be a good idea as they are ambitiously capable of stealing your bank passwords from right under your nose.

‘The Social Network’, starring the likes of Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg hits the US theatres on 1st October this year. It is based on the pioneers of the social networking giant Facebook. Early screenings of the movie brings with them a remarkable response and this prompts us to expect a new milestone in the making for Social Media as a whole.

However, the social network in question is not too thrilled at the prospect of this glory. They aren’t too comfortable at the idea of an intimate showcase of the website’s speedy escalation. While applauding his genius, the movie portrays the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, as a negatively driven entrepreneur at certain instances. Do they fear a social rejection post ‘The Social Network’. Highly unlikely. But the word out there is that Facebook officials are condoning the movie.

Despite this, the film manages to weave a breathtaking tale of how innovation is sometimes at a tangent with our morals. It paves way for many new questions – the differences in our real and social identities, our privacy, our choices and our perspectives; giving us a lingering insight on what is and what could be the consequence of our social escapades.

Meanwhile, the movie makers have launched an interactive trailer for the same on Facebook. The trailer doesn’t follow the usual trend; it reveals facts, videos, and statistics about the website.

The accuracy of the situations in the movie could be contemplated over post its release. But all the facts presented in the movie are accounted for in the transcripts of public court records.

Jeff Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere, has gone as far as calling it the strongest contender for Best Picture this year beating the highly acclaimed blockbuster, Inception. So are we looking at an Oscar win for the Social Network this year? Highly likely. Irrespective, be prepared to watch out for this one!

According to comScore, a marketing research company, in July 2010, Facebook registered 20.87 million users while Orkut has 19.87 million users, making Facebook the clear winner in a close battle between the two arch rivals. Facebook gained the top notch thanks to the increase in the Number of users by a whopping 179% from last year when it had a meager 7.47 million unique users in its kitty. On the other hand Orkut only noticed a small growth percentage of 16% from 2009.India is a huge market for social networking sites .In July alone 33 million Internet users visited these sites. Globally India stands on the seventh position in social networking with a growth rate of 43 percent from 2009.

Although, the downfall of Orkut in India took place only now, globally it has been sluggish, seeing only a 1% rise. Facebook gained a 55% rise (571 million users) while MySpace suffered a loss by 21% (98 million users).

According to social media analysts, Facebook has gained momentum because it attracts older age groups also along with the younger users. Facebook also took the pie in advertising content, as more newspapers and businesses allow the users to share their respective content with other users on their friend list. Facebook also has games like Farmville, Restaurant City, and Mafia Wars, as also the various applications including send flowers, hug your friend and quizzes.

Analysts say that Orkut lost the war because the communities are very repetitive and the security is weak. Facebook is more appealing and provides a better security.Orkut is in a state of dismay and shock after losing the top rank and has brought about some immediate changes to reinforce itself as it is still a popular social-networking site. Orkut plans to improvise its applications and pages. The buzz is that it is coming up with Google Me, a competitor for Facebook.

Presently, Google is ahead of Facebook in usage only in Brazil with a user base of almost 29 million while Facebook is catching up, with a current customer base of only about   eight million. In this race, newbie Twitter has a rather impressive growth rate of 239 per cent since July last year.

So since the winner takes it all, congratulations Facebook! And good luck Orkut for 2011! The reading for next year would be equally interesting and the race to win the crown to reign the social media world would be intense. But in the battle between Orkut and Facebook, don’t ignore Twitter. The way the site is progressing up, it could be a well narrated cat taking away the cake in the fight between the monkeys saga. May the best social networking site win.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Social networking website Facebook has now planned to develop a new security measure to combat bullying and offensive messages, termed “trolling” in internet lingo.

“Trolling” in internet jargon means bombarding users with offensive messages or abuse. This is done by anonymous Facebook users. ”

Users who send lots of messages to non-friends, or whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate, are marked as suspect

”, a Facebook spokesperson said.

The Facebook officials are now working on combating this problem so that users can get better services and such abuses can be taken care of.

The spokesperson also said that while the giant social networking site has employed “robust” operations, the engineers are developing new programmes to combat the problem.

Generally a number of tribute pages have been targeted by trollers, including the ones dedicated to the American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan.

As of now, users have to manually delete such messages by clicking on the “delete” option. But since complaints against abuses are growing everyday, Facebook has said that it is now working on systems that would automatically delete abuse.

Mr. Jim Gamble, Britain’s official for Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), who has been working with the site to fight this cyber menace, has welcomed the move.

According to Gamble the “ClickCEOP” application was launched in July this year, and ever since it was downloaded more than 10,000 times. The application helps the users to report cyber crimes and problems by providing them with a link through which they can get advices and help.

Facebook definitely is trying hard to keep miscreants on the back foot. Let’s see how far they succeed, although if such a system is developed, it will be a great relief to the users.