Google is killing some more products that never caught on, including Buzz, its 2010 stab at competing with Twitter. Buzz is famous mostly for the immediate controversy over its privacy practices; for a service built right into Gmail, it gained amazingly little traction. And now Google+ does everything it does, only better. So it’s no shock to see it go, and I wonder just how many people there are on the planet who will mourn its demise.

I’m still having fun over on Google+, but boy, is it suffering from a run of bad press. First, there are stories about its traffic plummeting after the site went open, suggesting that real people are trying it and then losing interest. And now a Google engineer wrote a blistering Google+ critique for his colleagues–and then accidentally shared it with everybody on Google+.

It’s not live on the App Store for me yet–and I like the third-party MyPad quite a bit–but there’s finally an official Facebook app for the iPad.

Over at Cult of Mac, Mike Elgan is warning Apple that Facebook is a threat to its dominance of digital entertainment:

Facebook will enable the discovery, sharing, buying and renting of movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion and Flixter.

And just as the iPad is gaining traction as the electronic newspaper of choice, Facebook announces partnerships with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo News and others to make Facebook the default online newspaper site.

Facebook is now more directly threatening to Apple’s business model than Microsoft, Google and Sony combined.

Mike is right that if Facebook’s new media-consumption and -sharing features could start to steal customers away from Apple. And he has a solution in mind: Apple needs to build its own social network. Something way better than Ping, which doesn’t seem to have changed iTunes that much, let alone the world.

If Apple were to come up with a cool social network, it would be…cool! But I fret that it’s not in the company’s nature to wade too deeply into the messy, unruly pool of user-generated content. Apple likes things perfect, not social. And an Apple that was great at social networking might not be so hot at all the things Apple is already so good at.

Continue reading this story…

Facebook’s f8 conference started off on a light note, with Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg doing his best Mark Zuckerberg impression, but the conference quickly got down to serious business with some big changes for the world’s biggest social network.

With a huge smile on his face, Zuckerberg showed off a new kind of Facebook profile, called the “Timeline.” Think of your Timeline as a digital scrapbook that builds itself automatically through your activity on Facebook. Photos, app updates and other Facebook activity assemble in reverse chronological order, forming what Zuckerberg described as the “story of your life.” Whatever details are missing, you can add manually.

Continue reading this story…

My latest TIME.com column–online now and in print next week–is about Google+, identity, and anonymity.

I’ll be attending Facebook’s F8 developer conference tomorrow. It kicks off at 10am with a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg, who will apparently talk about new media-sharing features, presumably among other topics. (I’m still holding out for a great Facebook app for the iPad.) I’ll liveblog the keynote at technologizer.com/f8, and hope you’ll join me…

With the 2012 campaign expected to cost candidates well over a billion dollars, it’s no surprise that companies that count on advertising are angling to get a slice of that huge pie. Twitter is one of them, and plans to market its advertising services to the campaigns thanks to a key hire of a former political marketing executive from Google.

Twitter told Politico that it plans to sell ads through features such as promoted tweets and trends. At least five campaigns have already signed on to the new offering, including Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign. Twitter declined to specify the other participants.

One thing it will not do is insert ads within user’s timeline, a new advertising option that it has been experimenting with over the past few months. It also plans to differentiate a political ad from a standard one: the ad will carry a small purple checkmark.

You won’t see the standard “I approve this message” tag on tweets. Twitter won’t display them directly with the tweet, however hovering over the tweet would show who purchased the advertising if the campaign decides to disclose it. (It should be obvious anyway, since the ads would direct to a URL or Twitter account where the identity would be disclosed, I’d guess).

I wonder if like TV and radio, Twitter will become a sea of political ads in the days before an election, with the candidates sniping at each other continuously. Let’s hope not.

So young, so promising. It was in its prime, and stood to reap the rewards of all of Facebook’s flaws—and in a weird twist, made Facebook copy Google+ for some of its newest “changes.”

But the fact of the matter is, public posts on Google+ have decreased 41 percent since the social networking service launched a few months ago. Even Larry Page, you know – Google’s CEO – last updated one month ago. And I thought something was wrong with me when I forced myself to post something on Google+ so my friends didn’t think I’d virtually disappeared.

Continue reading this story…

Pay no attention to the first person on this list of techies to follow on Google+, as compiled by TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner. But the rest of his choices are worth your attention.

Somebody annoying you enough in your Google+ feed (Robert Scoble, maybe? Just kidding, buddy!) that you’d rather not read their incessant posts? Are you not doing anything because you think blocking them is just a bit too harsh? Well, the fine folks at Google have added a new feature to the social networking service just for you.

Now available is the “Ignore” option. Rather than blocking people from seeing and interacting with you and vice versa, it will remove their posts from your stream and disable notifications on their posts. What it won’t do is prevent them from seeing or interacting with your content however.

This seems like a useful feature for the celebrities that Google is now trying to attract to Plus. They can ignore those overzealous fan that’s just a bit too obnoxious. The best thing about Ignore is the ignored person isn’t notified, so no hard feelings.

Ignore is rolling out now so it may not immediately be available to you, but when it is you’ll be able to access the option through one of the following: from your circles themselves, by clicking on the down-arrow drop down to the right of the post in the streams, or from the notifications window in the Google bar.

When the Google +1 button first appeared, it really had only one purpose and that had to do with search. As you +1′d stuff around the Web, all it would really do is highlight pages you recommend to your circle of friends on Google’s search results.

That was before Google+. Now, the +1 button can do much more, and the company realizes this. The feature will act a lot more like Facebook’s “Like” button: when you +1 something, it will now appear in your stream to be viewable to allow your followers.

I should mention that on your Google +profile, there has always been a +1 tab where your +1′s (as long as you were logged in to the account you have a Google+ profile with) were stored. It’s buried, though, and I’m willing to bet many didn’t even realize it was there.

Just like the “Like” button, the new +1 button will allow you to comment on what you’re +1′ing. It will also allow you to select who you want to share it with, a feature Facebook recently added to its own offering.

It’s good to see that Google is making these changes . I guess you could call it the natural progression for the +1 button as social sharing becomes more important to Google in light of Google+’s dramatic gains in popularity.

SendLove.to, which launched this week, wants to get people talking about politicians, entertainment figures, and other celebrities–and to do so, it’s launching an intriguing service that feels a little like a Facebook Like button and a little like a commenting system. It hopes that vast quantities of blogs will start using it, creating a giant community of people across the Web assessing famous personages.

SendLove is available as a plugin for WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and other blogging platforms. Its technology scans the words in an article, identifies public figures mentioned in them, and turns their names into hyperlinks. Click on one of the links, and you can vote the person in question up or down, and (optionally) add a comment about him or her.

At the bottom of the page, SendLove rejiggers the comments section so that there are tabs for the personages mentioned in the post.  The tabs graph the person’s popularity over time, both at the specific site and across the Web.

Continue reading this story…

“Old Twitter”–the version that predated the much-improved one which Twitter released last September–has remained available as an option. Now the company has terminated it. None of you were still using it, were you?

Mark Victor Burgos up as one of the world’s most stupid fugitives. The 29-year-old apparently found it amusing to taunt law enforcement over his Facebook page, even going as far as to say in a post “Catch me if you can, I’m in Brooklyn.” Well, guess where cops found him.

Burgos, a Brooklyn resident, was wanted by the Utica, N.Y. Police for questioning surrounding charges of domestic violence and harassment against an ex-girlfriend. Seemingly thinking he could play games with the police over Facebook, he posted a series of taunts, even going as far as posting a video of him walking into what is believed to be an NYPD police station.

Police say that Burgos’ Facebook page was open when they finally tracked him down to an apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. U.S. Marshals and representatives of the NYPD made the arrest, and was transferred back upstate to face a judge on the charges Tuesday.

No word on what Burgos has plead or if Facebook assisted in tracking him down, but he did delete his taunts before police busted through his door — probably realizing they could be used as evidence against him. Probably the smartest thing he did in this whole mess, don’t you think?

A lot of us early Google+ users have spent a lot of time wondering whether Circles–the social network’s feature for limiting your sharing to a subset of your friends–is as killer a feature as Google seems to think it is. Maybe so. Over at All Things Digital, Liz Gannes takes note of an intriguing factoid: two-thirds of Google+ updates are private, not public.