5 Features and Drawbacks of Google+

The new service is only available to a limited number of people right now, but once it opens up to the public Google+ could prove to be a popular Facebook alternative. Here's a look at some of the features and drawbacks I found while putting Google+ through its paces.

Feature: Circles

Sharing content with friends in Google+ starts with Circles, which are basically groups of friends organized by you. The idea behind Circles is that you may only want to share certain pieces of content such as a NSFW video or a link to a hot button political news story with certain people. As Google sees it, the way we currently share on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and even Buzz is sloppy (share with everyone all the time), scary (do you really want your coworkers to see everything you do online?) and insensitive (very little nuance in the way you define a friend or family member).





That's where Circles comes in. You assign people to your Circles by simply dragging and dropping their contact card into the group you want them to be a part of and that's it. Circles is a quick and easy way to organize your friends, and it's what Facebook's friends lists should have been.








Google+ is integrated into the navigation bar at the top of almost all Google products (not including Blogger and YouTube). That way you can always keep tabs on the latest notifications from Google+. Even better, you don't have to travel back to the Google+ home page to see what's going on. Just click on the notification icon and the updated conversation appears in a drop-down window on the page you're viewing. You can then add your own comment, mute the post, move through other conversations on Google+ or go back to the home page. The navigation bar also includes a "Share" button so you can share new content without shuffling between pages.





Feature: Easy data liberation



Google likes to talk about how you can get your data out of Google products whenever you want. The company even created a group called the Data Liberation Front that is supposed to make sure Google lives up to its promises. But in my experience, the way to get your data out of apps such as Docs or Gmail is cumbersome and slow. Not so with Google+. Clicking on the cog in the upper right hand corner and selecting "Google+ settings" from the social network's home page brings you to a revamped Google Accounts page. From there, you can select the Data Liberation tab. And with just a few clicks you can download data from your Picasa Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, Buzz and contacts. The process is reminiscent of Facebook's new data download feature.




Google recently launched Google+, the company's latest attempt to get social networking right after its social disaster, Google Buzz. After trying out Google's new social network for several hours, I think Google may have finally figured out how to do social.


Google+ is focused on letting you share photos, links, and videos with your online friends, family and acquaintances. The new service is also designed to let you target your sharing with specific people instead of the default "share with everyone" approach that services like Facebook and Twitter offer. Google+ also offers video chat and instant messaging features that let you chat with individuals or groups of up to 10 people at once.

The new service is only available to a limited number of people right now, but once it opens up to the public Google+ could prove to be a popular Facebook alternative. Here's a look at some of the features and drawbacks I found while putting Google+ through its paces.


Feature: Circles

Sharing content with friends in Google+ starts with Circles, which are basically groups of friends organized by you. The idea behind Circles is that you may only want to share certain pieces of content such as a NSFW video or a link to a hot button political news story with certain people. As Google sees it, the way we currently share on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and even Buzz is sloppy (share with everyone all the time), scary (do you really want your coworkers to see everything you do online?) and insensitive (very little nuance in the way you define a friend or family member).


That's where Circles comes in. You assign people to your Circles by simply dragging and dropping their contact card into the group you want them to be a part of and that's it. Circles is a quick and easy way to organize your friends, and it's what Facebook's friends lists should have been.


Google+ is integrated into the navigation bar at the top of almost all Google products (not including Blogger and YouTube). That way you can always keep tabs on the latest notifications from Google+. Even better, you don't have to travel back to the Google+ home page to see what's going on. Just click on the notification icon and the updated conversation appears in a drop-down window on the page you're viewing. You can then add your own comment, mute the post, move through other conversations on Google+ or go back to the home page. The navigation bar also includes a "Share" button so you can share new content without shuffling between pages.

Feature: Easy data liberation

Google likes to talk about how you can get your data out of Google products whenever you want. The company even created a group called the Data Liberation Front that is supposed to make sure Google lives up to its promises. But in my experience, the way to get your data out of apps such as Docs or Gmail is cumbersome and slow. Not so with Google+. Clicking on the cog in the upper right hand corner and selecting "Google+ settings" from the social network's home page brings you to a revamped Google Accounts page. From there, you can select the Data Liberation tab. And with just a few clicks you can download data from your Picasa Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, Buzz and contacts. The process is reminiscent of Facebook's new data download feature.

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Google+ released New Social Networking Site

A day after Google unveiled its brand new social networking service Google+, the company decided to open up the invitation process late Wednesday afternoon to those lucky enough to have already been invited to participate in the service. Thus I got an early look at Google's new social network.

Google has stressed that Google+ is in its early stages. However, whatever Google was aiming for with its "field trial" must have been successful, because as everyone who was invited in to the service is now able to invite other people in.

Even the second wave of invitees was able to invite friends to join the service.

All this attention must have been a bit more than Google bargained for. After about six hours, the company shut the invitation process down over what Google's senior vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, called "insane demand."

"We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way," he posted to his Google+ page late Wednesday night. He did not specify when the invite functionality would return.

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Mobile Radiation Effects Human Brian

Radiation from cell phones could possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

In a report issued today, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is an arm of the WHO, said it now lists mobile phone use in the same category as lead, gasoline engine exhaust, and chloroform. Officially, cell phone radiation is listed as a "carcinogenic hazard."

Until today, the WHO's IARC had said that there were no adverse health effects from the use of cell phones. The wireless industry, including the CTIA lobbying group, and the Federal Communications Commission and U.S. Food and Drug Administration have also long maintained that cell phones are safe.

The CTIA, the wireless industry trade association in the U.S., was quick to point out that the WHO's IARC did not say that cell phones definitely cause cancer.

"IARC conducts numerous reviews and in the past has given the same score to, for example, pickled vegetables and coffee," John Walls, vice president of public affairs for CTIA, said in a statement. "This IARC classification does not mean cell phones cause cancer. Under IARC rules, limited evidence from statistical studies can be found even though bias and other data flaws may be the basis for the results."

The group also emphasized that the IARC's determination was based on reviewed published studies and was not the result of new scientific research.

"The IARC working group did not conduct any new research, but rather reviewed published studies," Walls continued. "Based on previous assessments of the scientific evidence, the Federal Communications Commission has concluded that '[t]here's no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer.' The Food and Drug Administration has also stated that '[t]he weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phones with any health problems.'"

In response to Tuesday's news, an FCC spokesman said, "The FCC currently requires cell phones to meet safety standards based on the advice of federal health and safety agencies. We support the IARC recommendation for more research to clearly identify any potential health risks and, as appropriate, consider whether further actions may be required."

The new determination from the WHO's IARC was established at a meeting in France where a team of 31 scientists from 14 countries, including the United States, considered peer-reviewed studies about the safety of cell phones. The team said that it had found enough evidence to consider exposure to cell phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

The scientists reiterated what many in the field have said for years, which is that there are not enough long-term studies to decisively say one way or another whether cell phone radiation causes cancer. But there is enough data to show connections between exposure and health risks for consumers to be concerned.


Jonathan Samet, a medical doctor and professor from the University of Southern California, and the overall Chairman of the IARC's Working Group, which reviewed the studies, said in a statement today that "the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk."

The IARC has not yet published new guidelines for cell phone use, but the director of the organization suggested that concerned consumers take precautions to reduce exposure. He also emphasized the need for more research.

"Given the potential consequences for public health of this classification and findings, it is important that additional research be conducted into the long-term, heavy use of mobile phones," IARC Director Christopher Wild said in a statement. "Pending the availability of such information, it is important to take pragmatic measures to reduce exposure such as hands?free devices or texting."

The IARC said in a statement that it considered hundreds of scientific articles, including some recent articles that had been published as a result of the 10-year Interphone study.



A report summarizing the main conclusions of the IARC Working Group and the evaluations of the carcinogenic hazard from radiofrequency electromagnetic fields, including the use of cell phones, will be published in the medical journal, The Lancet Oncology in its July 1 issue. The IARC also expects to publish the full report online in a few days.

A year ago, the IARC published some results from the Interphone research project, an ambitious, decade-long study that included data gathered by 21 scientists from around the world to study 13,000 individuals in 13 different countries. It was the largest research program to study the effects of cell phone radiation to date, but many researchers conceded that the results of the study were inconclusive.

Initially, the official word from the WHO's IARC was that most cell phone use did not lead to an increased risk of either meningioma, a common but typically benign form of cancer, or glioma, a rare but more dangerous type of brain cancer. But the group conceded that more research is needed, especially since cell phone use has increased dramatically since 2000, particularly among younger people.

"An increased risk of brain cancer is not established from the data from Interphone," Wile, IARC's director, said in a statement at the time that the report was issued. "However, observations at the highest level of cumulative call time and the changing patterns of mobile phone use since the period studied by Interphone, particularly in young people, mean that further investigation of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk is merited."

Some experts have interpreted the results to suggest that people who use a cell phone for at least an hour each day over a 10-year period are at an increased risk of developing some brain tumors. This research, these experts argue, also suggests that these tumors are more likely to be on the side of the head where the phone is most often used.

However, the authors of the epidemiological studies that came to these conclusions have acknowledged that possible biases and errors from those participating in the survey meant that these results were not conclusive enough to directly blame cell phone radiation for such tumors. For example, critics of these studies say that subjects may have recall bias. Subjects in the study diagnosed with brain tumors may have better recall of how often they used their cell phones and on which side of their heads they usually placed their phones than the control groups that do not suffer from these ailments.

Today's determination by the WHO's IARC that cell phone use could cause cancer still does little to clear up the confusion around whether cell phones present a significant risk to human health. We simply still do not know. But to date, the World Health Organization's warning is the most significant one so far to suggest that people take precautions.

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