Is Google + just ‘Facebook for Grown-ups’?

When Facebook was launched I decided not to join up. It just seemed like another website to waste my time entering data into, uploading pictures and then never use. But suddenly I found that I was missing out on events, news and parties because everything was happening through Facebook and I wasn’t part of it. So I joined up, got sucked in for a while, checked it 20 times a day, changed my status, uploaded pictures etc. After a while the novelty wore off a little and now I just dip in from time to time, but it’s still a great way to stay in touch and connect with people without actually having to ‘get in touch’ with them.

Then there was Google Buzz and just as I decided to start using it, it seemed to vanish. People found Google Buzz difficult to get into because you couldn’t categorise the people you were following. It also had a big security flaw when it was launched that opened up Google Profiles to outside people so that they could look at who your contacts were and who you were chatting with most, so many people were sceptical about getting involved and it got off to a slow start. Also, with most people already using Facebook and Twitter, a lot of people thought ‘what’s the point?’ Google Buzz was around for a little over a year before Google announced that they were going to shut it down. I’m glad I didn’t waste my time.

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Google ‘Jump to’ Links Getting Confused by AJAX?

Last week Google announced they were testing the use of ‘Jump to’ links in snippets, which direct users to the part of the page which is most relevant for a particular query using named anchors within the page. Richard at Seogadget has a nice write up of how Google is using these links and how you can go about influencing them.

Basically, Google is latching onto id names within the markup of a page. i.e. www.mydomain.com#my-named-anchor.

The problem is a lot of javascript/ ajax scripts also use the # tag in the url and named anchors to trigger actions within the content of the page and Google might not be filtering these properly from the pages which use named anchors in the traditional way to jump to parts of the page.

As an example the FLA’s car finance guide triggers the ‘Jump to’ links on this query:

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