Facebook is expanding its group file sharing features to give all groups the ability share files between members, we’ve confirmed with a spokesperson.

Last month, the social network gave school-specific groups this functionality but it did not share that it would make the feature available widely until Mashable reported the news today. According to the Facebook Help Center, there will be a “Files” tab at the top of a group page and an “upload file” icon in the publisher. Users can share presentations, schedules, documents and other files with a group. Mashable says this excludes music files to avoid copyright infringement issues.

Documents within a group can be public or available to members-only based on the original privacy setting of the group. Public groups cannot make individual files members-only without making the entire group “closed” or “private.”

Previously, users could create and co-edit “docs” within groups, but these could not be printed or exported to other word processors. The new files feature does not allow online editing, but users can download files, make edits and upload a new version. When users upload a revised version of a file, the previous version of the file remains available.

Facebook acquired file-sharing company Drop.io in 2010, but we’ve learned this project was completely independent of that. Drop.io founder Sam Lessin was most recently involved with the Timeline redesign and organ donation initiative, according to his Facebook profile.

File-sharing will begin to roll out to all groups, regardless of size, today.

Image credit: Mashable

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

In my four-plus years covering tech, I don’t think I’ve ever met another blogger who was happy with the search feature on their website. The options range from terrible to functional, but it’s never good, and I’ve always found that it’s easier to just search via Google.

Apparently Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie saw the same problem when they were working at Scribd. So they left to build a better website search engine, one that they’re calling Swiftype. The startup was part of Y Combinator’s latest class of companies, and it’s launching today.

What makes Swiftype better? For starters, Riley and Hoxie say that unlike Google Site Search, it’s not just taking Google’s global web rankings and filtering them for one website. Instead, it builds (in Hoxie’s words) “a PageRank that’s specific to individual websites.” So it looks at the signals of importance on your website and prioritizes content accordingly. For example, if you link to anything from your front page, that’s a pretty big signal that it’s important to you and should be ranked highly.

On top of that, Swiftype also allows site owners to pin and unpin different items to the top of their search results. If you’re a news site, that might mean pinning the most popular and best articles, or it might mean promoting content that’s related to an ongoing sponsorship campaign. And Swiftype offers a set of tags that publishers can include in their pages to show which content should be surfaced in the results.

Other features include analytics data and auto-complete for people typing in their search.

Riley and Hoxie showed me the process of creating an engine for your site. You point Swiftype at the URL, and it crawls the site multiple times, refining the results as it goes. Then you can adjust the rankings to your liking, choose from a couple of different layouts, and finally grab some code to add to your site. (Among other things, Swiftype is supposedly easy to integrate with Tumblr.) In other words, there’s virtually no technical work required from the publisher — something else that distinguishes Swiftype from the various other search products and open source libraries out there. At same time, companies who want a little more control can access Swiftype through its APIs.

Swiftype has been working with a few beta customers, including Twilio, TwitchTV, Parse, Listia, and Fastly. These are technically sophisticated companies, so it’s not like they couldn’t build their own search features, but Riley says they realize it’s “not their core competency,” so they’re looking for something like Swiftype that’s “dead simple to use.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook quietly released an API for its new real-time Insights last week that lets developers build tools that allows companies to track news feed post performance, virality, and negative feedback. Just five days later, EdgeRank Checker has just released a dashboard for monitoring this data so clients can publish the best possible content on their Facebook Page, and earn the biggest return on their social media investment.

Before Facebook even announced the real-time Insights API, my scoop on its coming launch kicked EdgeRank Checker into high-gear. Founder Chad Wittman tells me “when you broke the news about real-time coming, I had a million great ideas. Now is the time to implement as many as possible.” We hustle all day on the news here at TechCrunch, so we like to see when developers put the same passion into their code.

Facebook used to take days to update its Insights graphical user interface and API with data on news feed post performance. That was too slow for companies to realize a post was getting so many clicks that they should promote it with Sponsored Stories ads. It was also too slow to show a post was so annoying that users were unsubscribing from that Page and that the publisher should delete the post immediately. Only Likes, comments, and shares were shown in real-time.

Now Facebook Insights and its API update every five to fifteen minutes, and so does EdgeRank Checker’s tool. Unlike Facebook’s native Insights GUI which has to be refreshed for new data, EdgeRank Checker clients can just leave the browser-based tool open and watch data roll in. This per post data includes:

• Organic, viral, and paid impressions
• Unique viewers
• Clicks of links, photos, videos or any other in-post content
• Likes, comments, and shares
• Virality and viral lift (how paid and viral impact organic)
• Negative feedback such as unlikes and being hidden from the news feed

The bootstrapped EdgeRank Checker is still scrambling to increase its server capacity, so unfortunately for now clients have to leave the dashboard open in a browser window  to get data every five minutes. Otherwise when they return they’ll see data points for every hour. Wittman tells me “Regardless, we felt this tool was valuable enough to contribute to users immediately. There’s nothing like this out there.” EdgeRank Checker gave TechCrunch the exclusive on this launch, which it will announce later today.

As the roll-out of real-time Insights is just now hitting the last Facebook Pages, expect other analytics providers like PageLever and Webtrends to release real-time tools soon. The fact is you can’t win at social media by going on hunches. You need data to know what do. Otherwise you could be shooting yourself in the foot without realizing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The U.S. Justice Department just formally charged Apple, along with book publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin in regards to e-book pricing. The DoJ alleges that the companies colluded in anticompetitive practices involving pricing and sales. This comes after a year-long investigation into the matter after Apple switched to an “agency” model where they retained a portion of the sale of e-books sold through its platforms. This is said to have resulted in higher prices industry-wide, since the power to set prices rested in the hands of only a few sellers.

Bloomberg reports that several publishers are seeking to settle with the DoJ. Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins could settle as soon as today. (Update: They just settled) However, Apple and Macmillan reportedly refused to engage in settlement talks, so far denying the claims. This might get ugly.

With e-book sales rising rapidly, the DoJ is seeking to ensure the consumer isn’t seeing unnecessary price increases caused by this so-called agency model employed by Apple. This model lets the publisher–rather than the vendor–set prices, which is why the big five publishers jumped onboard. Apple just asks for 30% of the end sale.

“Traditional” booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have stuck to the wholesale pricing model, in which they purchase the rights to a book and set their own price. This often stiffs the publishers as the retailers turn bestsellers into loss leaders, causing them to be undervalued in the publisher’s view. But with Apple, the big five can price books how they see fit. Both sides can be effectively argued as pro-consumer.

Even if the DoJ rules against Apple, its agency business model might stay intact. Apple and the publishers would likely simply have to comply with stringent regulations.

Update: Minutes after the initial report hit, Bloomberg is reporting that Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins just settled with the DoJ over unspecified terms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Google is announcing a partnership with a NY-based company called Signpost, which will now run deals on the Google Offers website and in subscriber emails. Signpost, which has $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Spark Capital and other angels, has been flying under the radar in the local deals space. The company recently tripled its employee base and now claims revenue has been growing at a rate of 100% month-over-month.

The company also recently announced a partnership with Nimble Commerce, and says it has other partnerships in the works as well.

According to Signpost CEO Stuart Wall, the company has shifted its business model since we covered them back in fall 2010. Now, it’s basically a marketing platform for small businesses, or what he calls an “AdSense for local commerce.”

For $100/month (15% of which goes to the publisher for commission), Signpost creates an e-commerce (and/or m-commerce) presence for its business customers, then works with them to create campaigns. Normally, these campaigns involve something of value that’s sent out – that is to say, an offer. Signpost gives the businesses access to its 1,200 partners, which now includes Google Offers, to run the campaigns.

Walls says that 95% of his business customers get a better CPM, CPC, and CPA, than they would have gotten on Yelp or AdWord’s local averages, because of its targeting capabilities. And Signpost customers seem to agree – 90% of the small businesses renew the service each month.

Last month, Wall says Signpost’s merchants received 8 million uniques across its publisher sites. The CPA for its customers is now around $12, he adds.

“Compare that with sites like Yelp,” (which has CPM’s around $600), says Wall. “There are a number of sites out there that charge on a CPM basis, which, if you actually do the math on what the CPA is, it can be north of $300. We think Yelp is in that category.”

The other problem with many local advertising platforms, explains Wall, is that they’re just driving impressions. In that case, while the number of people who see the offer may be high, the number of people who actually go visit the business is often “terrible,” he says – which is why closed loop transactions are key focus for Signpost.

The company now has content in 50 U.S. markets, not all of which have a Google Offers presence yet. But everywhere Google Offers is, Signpost is established.

“We do work with a number of flash sales sites,” Wall explains of the new deal. “I consider what Google Offers does as being in Groupon category. We only look to customers who drive high quality consumers for our small business customers, and we think Google Offers falls into that category. We’re excited to work with them,” he says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Automattic is announcing a new feature for large-scale sites hosted in WordPress.com VIP SaaS program (TechCrunch is a VIP publisher)—Featured Partners for third-party integrations. Basically, the program allows companies that have integrated their services with the WordPress platform to promote and seamlessly enable their tools for large-scale VIP sites, which account for one billion page views each month.

WordPress.com VIP will vet potential Featured Partners and review their code, to ensure a tight integration with the WordPress.com VIP platform. Chartbeat, ContextLogic, Daylife, Livefyre, MediaPass Subscriptions, Ooyala, SocialFlow, Uppsite and Mobilize with Wibiya are the first to join the program.

While these services could previously work with VIP blogs on an individual basis (i.e. outside of any WordPress.com relationship), the VIP team is now actually reviewing and endorsing these services. WordPress.com is also working to make sure the integrations with these services are seamless for the publisher. With Automattic’s endorsement, these services could be more attractive to a large site.

We’re told there is no category exclusivity for the Featured Partner program. Automattic will continue to add more plugin partners across various services & verticals (mobile, social, video etc.). Currently, WordPress powers 15.8% of the world’s top one million sites, up from 8.5% in 2010.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable.

There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects.

This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process.

The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest.

At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers.

It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead:  it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones.

Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Israeli company BIScience has a launched a new product called AdClarity, which it says will give advertisers more data than they’ve ever had about their competitors’ advertising plans.

CEO Orey Gilliam notes that the online advertising landscape has evolved to the point where there’s rarely a direct link between advertiser and publisher but rather “a complex deployment chain of ads.”Take your normal banner ad. Just by looking at it, you can tell who the advertiser is, and the publisher, but the intermediaries — the ad networks, agencies, and affiliate networks — aren’t apparent, leaving you in the dark if you really want to understand how a campaign was executed. With AdClarity, on the other hand, BiScience claims you can see exactly where a campaign ran, which mediators were used, and what the ad creative looked like.

There were, Gilliam acknowledges, already “hacks” to obtain some of this data, but none as comprehensive as AdClarity: “There are no solutions that do this across sites, calculate share of voice, report trends and add value to marketers.”

BIScience previously released an ad data product called GeoSurf, and it says GeoSurf customers include CPX Interactive, Playfish, Peanut Labs, and Miniclip. The larger goal, Gilliam says, is not just to serve individual advertisers, but also to become the “system of record” for the industry as a whole.

“Right now we are focused on the display channel and geographical targeting, but in the near future we are adding the mobile, social and video channels which cover their demographics and category targeting as well,” Gilliam says. “Once all is in place we will be able to provide actionable insights and analysis across channels, geographies, demographics and categories.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other. Note that Price is not unbiased in this discussion — should the Research Works Act pass, it would decrease the number of papers the site would be able to easily distribute among researchers. But, as he explains, his viewpoint is shared by many academics. Update: The original version of this article had an issue with some text getting stripped — the full article is now here.

Poorly thought-through copyright bills seem to be popular in Congress these days.

Congress is currently considering a bill called “The Research Works Act”, whose purpose is to restrict public access to publicly-funded research. The bill is sponsored by large academic publishers who are keen to keep all research, including publicly-funded research, behind paywalls in perpetuity.

Academics are up in arms about this bill, and so are universities, and funding bodies. Over 5,500 academics have signed a boycott of Elsevier, who is the largest academic publisher, and one of the main sponsors of the bill. Elsevier is the target of the boycott not only because of its support of the Research Works Act, but also because of the increasingly high prices that it is charging for its journals.

Making research accessible: the open access mandate

Currently the US government provides about $30 billion of funding every year for research in biology and medicine. This funding is dispensed by a federal agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As part of its “open access mandate”, the NIH requires that any NIH-funded research has to be made freely accessible 12 months after publication. There can be a 12 month paywall, during which the publishers can recoup their costs, but after 12 months, the paywall has to come down. The thinking here is that the US taxpayer should not have to pay for research twice: once to fund it, and a second time to read it.

The aim of the Research Works Act is to reverse this open access policy, and ensure that all research remains behind publisher paywalls in perpetuity, even if it has been funded by the public.

Journal publishers have managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney (NY) and Darrell Issa (CA) that this Act is in the interests of the American public.

Journal publishers have two arguments in favor of the Research Works Act. I’ll refer to these publishers generically as ‘the journal industry’, though it’s worth noting that a there is a minority of journal publishers who don’t support the Research Works Act.

Journal Industry argument (1): The moral argument

The journal industry thinks that it is morally wrong for the government to ask for publicly-funded research to be freely accessible to the public.

The way the research process works is like this:

1. An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant
2. The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal
3. The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.

The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world.

However, in step 3, the journal publishers add some value to the paper, which we can call the “publisher delta”; this delta, or added value, consists mainly in formatting and secretarial skills around the organization of peer review (the peer reviewing itself is done for free, by academics).

The publisher delta is something they own, and is the result of private investment, rather than government funding. They believe that if an academic wants to share that publisher delta with the world, they should have to ask the publisher first.

In the eyes of the journal industry, it’s unfair, and a case of unwarranted government intervention into private markets, that the government should mandate that the publisher delta has to be shared with the public after 12 months.

Journal industry argument (2): The Sustainability argument

The public has a commitment to fund scientific research, and, as part of that commitment, it is wants to ensure the successful distribution of research.

The journal industry has historically supported itself by charging for access to research papers. It believes that the government’s open access mandate threatens the sustainability of the journal industry.

In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free.

As a result of this, revenues in the journal industry will drop, leading to the whole journal industry collapsing. If the journal industry disappears, the public will lose out, as it will lose its primary distribution model for research.

The flaw in the moral argument: customers should be allowed to negotiate for better business terms

The US government provides about $30 billion of funding each year for research in biology and medicine. In return, it gets around 80,000 published articles.

In the pre-web days, it cost quite a lot to distribute papers around the world. As a result, the US government understood that, if it was going to support distribution, it was going to have to offer relatively attractive distribution terms to the journal publishers. In particular, it was going to have to allow journal publishers to keep taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls in perpetuity. It was considered that no weaker terms would cover the cost of distribution.

Now, in the days of the web, distribution of content is dramatically cheaper. Correspondingly, taxpayers should be getting better distribution terms for the money they are investing in research. In particular, they should be able to read the research they have funded for free, at some point after publication, instead of being confronted with paywalls that exist for perpetuity.

To reflect the idea that the public should be getting a better deal, the National Institutes of Health, the dispenser of the US government’s $30 billion annual biomedical research budget, enacted its open access mandate in 2008. It’s this open access mandate that the journal industry wants to reverse.

Not only this, but the purpose of the Research Works Act is to make it illegal for the US government ever to negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research.

The journal industry wants the distribution terms that made sense in the pre-web days written into law, so that the US government can never change those terms. Economically handcuffing the US government like this would be a great outcome for the journal industry, and a terrible outcome for the public.

The moral argument carries no weight: clearly a customer who is buying a product should be allowed to seek better terms. In this case the customer is the US government, who is buying published scientific articles on behalf of the public.

A monopsonistic situation

The US government does, however, have to be careful with what it asks for. It is a monopsony in this situation, i.e. a single buyer. It funds virtually all the academic research into biology and medicine in the US. It therefore gets whatever it asks for, and so it needs to be careful that what it asks for is, indeed, in the interests of the public. It does not want the journal publishers to go out of business.

This pushes the focus onto the Sustainability argument. The journal industry argues that the US government’s open access mandate jeopardizes its revenues, and thereby puts the whole scientific distribution model at risk.

The flaw in the Sustainability Argument: revenues and profits in the journal industry are at record highs

The US government’s policy has been in place since 2008, so there are 3 years of revenue data to look at.

The top three academic publishers are Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. From 2008 to 2010:

• Their combined revenues grew 11% from $4.7 billion to $5.3 billion.
• Their profits grew 17% from $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.

It’s worth noting that these healthy revenue and profit increases occurred during a global recession.

The reasons that revenues have been rising are:

1. Journal subscription prices have been going up
2. The open access mandate hasn’t led departments to cancel their subscriptions

To be research-active, departments have to have the latest research. They can’t unsubscribe, and wait 12 months to get access to free research that is a year old.

The strong revenue and profit growth in the academic publishing industry leads one to wonder what Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa were thinking when they said that the US government’s open access policy would jeopardize their revenues and their business model. How did they reconcile the tale of woe that the journal industry has been telling with the annual reports of the journal publishers, which tell of growing and thriving businesses?

The strategic significance of The Research Works Act

The journal industry maintains a very strong grip on academic departments: they can keep on increasing subscription prices, and the departments have to pay up. You cannot be in business as a research institution without access to the journals. That grip currently shows no sign of loosening.

The effect of the Research Works Act would be that the journal industry would have a similarly iron grip on the US government, by making it illegal for the government to negotiate for better distribution terms for research.

Strategically the Research Works Act would be an amazing coup for the journal industry.

The journal industry has two paymasters in the US:

• the research institutions who buy the journal subscriptions
• the US government who funds almost all of the research.

The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

Fortunately, there is another paymaster, the US government, who can negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research. With the journal industry squeezing departments with price hikes over the last 15 years, the US government has managed to score a win for the public with its open access mandate in 2008.

If the Research Works Act passes, the journal industry will be able to continue squeezing departments with price hikes, and the only other major negotiating force, the US government will have been gagged. It would be a genius heist by the journal industry.

What next?

The journal industry is very good at lobbying. Somehow it managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney, and Darrell Issa, that the Research Works Act is good for the American people. Through a lack of scrutiny and care, Maloney and Issa are willingly embracing the handcuffs that the journal industry wants the US government to wear.

The brands of the journal publishers supporting the Research Works Act are currently in free-fall within the academic community. Hopefully Congress will notice this, and apply some scrutiny to the journal industry’s arguments for the Research Works Act.

Two excellent blogs for keeping up with the discussion around the Research Works Act are:

• Tim Gowers’s blog, one of whose posts sparked the Elsevier boycott
• Michael Eisen’s blog. Michael is the founder of the open access journal, PLoS.

The Elsevier boycott is gathering momentum on The Cost of Knowledge site. A good resource page of further links is maintained by Michael Nielsen here. The text of the Research Works Act is here.

You can contact Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa via their webpages:

• Carolyn Maloney’s Congressional page
• Darrell Issa’s Congressional page

A development in the last few days is that five members of Congress have proposed a counter-bill, called the Federal Research Public Access Act, which requires that virtually all federally research be accessible within 6 months of publication.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes and was formerly Group Product Manager at Google. She was the first product manager for the project that evolved to become Google+. Her Google+ profile can be found here.

Larry Page recently announced that he is quite thrilled with Google+’s explosive growth — with 90 million registered accounts and 80% of the people engaging on a weekly basis across all Google properties. The problem, of course, is that very few of these 90M users are actively publishing on Google+. The Google+ strategy of fine-grained sharing of personal content using Circles has not been very effective. It takes a lot of effort to create and maintain circles, and Facebook has proven that most users seem to be comfortable sharing personal content such as family albums and baby pictures with their complete social graph.

It is indeed a tall order for Google+ to win against Facebook in this area of communicating and sharing with your friends and family as it needs a significant exodus of a your social graph from Facebook.

One area where Google+ seems have gained traction is public sharing and broadcasting – a la Twitter. It has been impressive to see Google execute nimbly by adding multiple features to emerge as the iPhone of publishing platforms.

However, in order to take considerable user attention away from Facebook, Google+ needs to solve the biggest issue with public sharing — it is far less universal compared to communicating with friends and family.

There were 60 million active content creators on Twitter. Compare this to the 2 billion-plus Internet users and 800 million active Facebook users. Even if you include the few million users who are active in other public places like MySpace and Tumblr, only around 5 percent of the world’s Internet population is currently sharing on public profiles.

In order to make public sharing universal, user behaviour needs to change dramatically. The good news is that Google touches pretty much every Internet user and is in a great position to make this happen. Here are some ideas on how they can do this:

1. Help people build a meaningful audience

Most new users who start Google+ or Twitter accounts discover that it is really hard to get a following. Even importing Facebook or email contacts doesn’t help, because one-way follow semantics result in only a few of those contacts following you back.

The suggested-user list approach only serves to make things worse. New users end up following a bunch of famous personalities, with whom they do not have any meaningful interactions. Some brave souls end up posting a few times, but after seeing little or no engagement on their posts, give up pretty soon.

Behavior in online communities is very-peer driven and when people see similar, like minded people posting and interacting with others, they tend to follow suit. Google has the technology chops to suggest following these types of people instead of celebrities.

If we could get people to post about topics that they care about and get them to connect with people who both care about the same topics and are at the same audience level, we will see a lot more high-fidelity content and engagement as opposed to simply re-sharing the most popular image/video on the web.

For example, I am into technology, politics, fashion and food. As part of their onboarding process, Google+ could prompt me to post on these topics (even surfacing existing conversations as inspiration) and based on these posts suggest I circle other people who have the same interests and are likely to interact with me.

Over time, suggesting more of these kinds of relevant, actively engaged people, not only ensures that new users connect with people they want to meet, but also rewards activity with a larger audience.

This new “interest graph” is inherently a lot more valuable to the user than the “social graph” which simply moves your offline friends online.

The serotonin kick that you get from having strangers taking the time to read your post and make intelligent comments will soon get addictive, and kick-start a virtuous cycle of publishing and consumption.

2. Make public sharing safe and clean

One of the biggest issues with sharing publicly is having to deal with trolls, stalkers and unwanted spam comments/messages. I can tell from personal experience, that this issue is exacerbated if you are a woman. This is one of the main reasons you don’t see that many women sharing on Google+.

Google+ needs to identify and actively deactivate spam accounts who post irrelevant links on posts. While everyone should be allowed to like and re-share your posts, by default Google+ should only allow for comments with no-moderation from people you circle. All other comments should only be posted once the commenter has been reviewed by the publisher. Again technology could help with automatic flagging of comments for review.

Of course, users like Robert Scoble, can and will choose to turn off moderation but my bet is a large number of people would rather review comments in some way before having them show up on their profiles. In contrast, Twitter avoids this problem by simply not having any commenting features.

3. Get people to share on Google+ when they are already sharing elsewhere

Email is still one of the primary ways people share information with each other. Every day, millions of videos, links to articles and documents are shared via email.

Just like Google calender integration, Gmail could detect when you are sharing a public link/video and automatically cc that message to post on your public profile. This feature would immediately give Google millions of new active publishers.

Similarly, users on Blogger and YouTube should be able to share blog posts and comments by checking a box that gives them the option to share the content on Google+.

Allowing the user to choose and customize the post that is published on Google+ will ensure that Google+ posts continue to have high fidelity and user profiles don’t turn into noisy “dead-feeds” of information.

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Twitter has already shown the world how much of an impact public sharing can have even with a small percentage of people doing it. One can only imagine how much bigger the impact will be if this number becomes 5 times what it is now.

Revolutions, large scale social change, shaking up entrenched “old boys networks” all become more possible, when everyone has a voice and an audience.

We are in the middle of a huge shift in how information is created and curated on the Internet. Making publishing more universal plays very well to Google’s strength as an information company. In line with Google’s mission, its algorithms can work their magic to organize this information and make it universally accessible.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch