It's been a week for peering into the future and wondering what we'll be doing online.
Google+ is the search giant's latest attempt to drive its tanks onto Facebook's lawn and wipe the smile off founder Mark Zuckerberg's face.
After a selective release to 200,000 opinion-formers, Google+ has had a successful first few days. The new social networking tool's uncanny resemblance to Facebook has been much commented on but not much criticised.
And its most eye-catching feature, the ability to group friends into 'Circles' to aid sharing what you want with who you want, has been praised as if Facebook didn't already let its users create Groups of friends with the same effect.
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones was impressed with a Google+ feature called Hangout which lets you set up a group video chat with friends - or, in Rory's case, with four members of the Google press team. "It seemed to work pretty well," he concluded. (Questions would no doubt have been asked in Google PR circles if he had thought otherwise after so much staff attention.)
Elsewhere, you could take you pick of reactions to Google+:
- Five Reasons Why Google+ Will Succeed
- Five Reasons Why Google+ Will Fail
- Nine Reasons to Switch from Facebook to Google+
- Four Reasons Google+ Will be the Next Big Thing (and One Reason it Won't)
The last, by Manchester SEO specialist Andrew Nattan, gets to the point with its one negative for Google+:
"You don't use social networks. You use Facebook.
And it's not just you. Half of the population of the UK is on Facebook. My gran is on Facebook.
Even with the weight of Google Inc. behind it, Plus has a mountain to climb to gain a market share. And, once it's climbed the mountain, it's going to find Zuckerberg's angry giant waiting at the top.
That's going to be one hell of a battle."
What's more, Facebook is a moving target. This week one of its executives was telling a conference in New York about its plans to make choosing what to watch a more sociable experience.
Cory Bergman reported on Lost Remote ('all about social TV'):
"Facebook's Andy Mitchell told a crowd at the TV marketing conference PromaxBDA today that social programme guides are a growing opportunity.
'If you look at the programme guide [now], you're trying to figure out what to watch among five hundred channels. It's really hard,' Mitchell said. 'But think about a programme guide where you see what your friends are watching, that changes the experience.'"
And there are rumours of another big announcement from Facebook next week.
Rupert Murdoch has gone against the grain in his predictions about the future of newspapers with his paywall strategy for the Times. But this week NewsCorp reported that, after a year of the paywall, it had more than 100,000 subscribers. PaidContent turned that into hard cash (with excited bold for emphasis):
"Since the £2 weekly subscription subscription is billed as £8.66 per month, this would seem to give the publisher £874,971 in monthly paid digital revenue. In fact, it could be more than that, since subscriptions originated on iPad cost more, £9.99."
Former Times journalist George Brock put the figures into context, pointing out that subscription is only one side of the new business model:
"Digital subscriptions are part of a wider strategy to create a sufficiently large body of readers who, one way or another, buy more from the Times (and Sunday Times) than they ever used to even if they were regular buyers of the printed paper. In the jargon this game is known as 'average revenue per user' (or the unlovely ARPU). And the even longer game is having enough data about your users and their preferences to sell to advertisers who want to reach very selectively targeted audiences. A hundred thousand subscribers is a step on that road, but by no means the whole distance."
It sounds like a plausible business idea, but then (and I know this is a cheap shot) so did paying $580 million for the social network MySpace seven years ago. And this week Mr Murdoch bowed out of that new business with a humiliating £35 million sale.
Today, if you want to predict the way things are going, ask the crowd.
That's what technology writer John Battelle is doing as he embarks on a book that aims to tell us how the world will be in 2040. He's planning to share his thoughts with the readers of his blog and believes their feedback will help, as it did on his last book, about Google: "If I get half the feedback for this book that I got for the last one, I'll consider myself a lucky man."
So will it be Google+ or Facebook by 2040? I'm not sure Battelle will come down on that question, but he has got some interesting thoughts about decisions we're already making - consciously or not:
"I believe we are in a critical moment in our civilisation's development, one where we will face a number of fateful decisions about how we interact with each other, with business, and with government. The decisions we make during this period will frame the kind of world we'll leave to future generations. Who will control the data we create? What access will we allow citizens to the machinations of government? What kind of people will we become when every single one of us is deeply connected to a socially aware platform like Facebook?"
Personally, I don't even have to choose between Facebook and Google+ because I wasn't among the 200,000 in its initial roll-out. I'm off for the weekend: someone else can worry about the future.
