You Can Now Chat with Your Google+ Circles in Gmail, Orkut

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Google Talk has been around for quite a while. Most people saw it used in Gmail and it was added to Google+ as well. Even on the new social network, the chat widget has remained unchanged until now.

Google is making a subtle but very important change to the Google chat box, you can now talk to anyone in your Circles, not just the people you've added manually or had conversations with in Gmail.

"Google Chat makes it easy to chat with people you have relationships with. In Google+, you can chat with anyone in your Circles who also has added you to their Circles," Google explains.

"And, when you're not using Google Plus, you'll still be able to chat with them using Google products including, Gmail, the Google Talk client, iGoogle, Orkut and 3rd party apps," it adds.

It's an obvious move and one that should get a lot more people using the chat box in Google+. That said it's probably going to annoy at least some people that were already using the chat feature in Gmail and other places.

Google has been working on integrating Google+ in all of its products. Adding support for Circles in Google Talk is a logical step, maintaining two separate lists of friends/contacts doesn't really make sense, from Google's point of view.

With the new chat feature, you can talk to anyone on Google+ that you have in your circles and that has added you to theirs. Of course, existing contacts will also be available, even if they're not on Google+ and will sit on top of the friends list.

In fact, most Google+ friends won't show up in the chat list unless you've already chatted with them recently. You can look them up in the search box though.

Thanks to softpedia for this report

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Facebook Finds That People Are Only 4 Degrees Apart

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Facebook scientists, yes there exists such a thing, teamed up with fellow scientists over at the Università degli Studi di Milano to find out just how close two random people on Facebook were, i.e. how many degrees of separation there are between them.

It is an accepted fact, based on some older research, that two human beings are only six degrees apart, it only takes five people to reach one another solely through their friends and friends of friends.

The idea comes from the famous "small world experiment" from the 1960s. Facebook set out to find out whether, in the highly connected and networked world of today, that still holds true.

Earlier this year, Facebook took its entire pool of active users, 721 million of them at the time, and processed all of the friendship relations between them, 69 billion connections in total.

"First, we measured how many friends people have, and found that this distribution differs significantly from previous studies of large-scale social networks," Facebook wrote.

"Second, we found that the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown," it said.

"Finally, we observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user’s friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country," it added.

Of course, since all of the people in the study are Facebook users, they are only representative for their group, i.e. the average person is likely less 'connected' than the more than 10 percent of the human population Facebook looked at.

Facebook found out that the average user has about 100 friends. That is enough for 99.6 percent of all pairs of users to be separated by only six hops, five degrees.

92 percent were connected by four degrees, five hops. In fact, the number has been shrinking as Facebook grew larger. It says that the average was 5.28 hops in 2008 while it is now 4.74 hops.

What's more and hardly surprising, when limiting the connections to people in the same country, Facebook determined that the average two users were separated by only three degrees, four hops.

The results of this study are very important if only because it is the first time anyone has done anything approaching this scale. However, as Facebook notes, the results are not strictly comparable with previous studies for two main reasons.

First, as stated above, Facebook users are not representative for the average person on Earth. Second, Facebook had access to absolutely all connections and was able to calculate the shortest possible 'distance' between two people.

In the "small world experiment" people had to choose a friend who they believed would be more likely to be closer to the person they were trying to reach, which may not have always been correct.

Thanks to softpedia for this report..

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Google Chrome Overtakes Firefox to Become the No. 2 Browser in the World

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Google has finally done it, its Chrome browser is now the second most popular in the world, topped only by Internet Explorer. According to the latest StatCounter numbers, Chrome has just edged past Firefox, last week, taking the number two spot.

The most interesting part is that Chrome actually lost a bit of market share coming from the previous week; however, Firefox lost even more in that time.

In fact, the only major browser to add market share in the past week is Internet Explorer, in a reversal of a very old trend.

Google Chrome had a 25.47 percent share of the market, in the week ending November 13. Firefox on the other hand ended the week with just 25.32 percent.

Chrome had a 25.5 percent market share in the week before that, while Firefox had 25.79 percent.

But both browsers lost market share in the last week, mostly to Internet Explorer which saw an uptick in usage. IE went from 40.32 percent market share in the first week of November to 40.78 percent in the following week.

At this point, Chrome and Firefox are too close, so things may change, Firefox may regain the second spot, if only temporarily.

However, the broader trends, as seen in Statcounter data, but also discovered by other players keeping an eye on the web browser market, shows Firefox slowly declining or stagnating, while Google Chrome keeps on growing.

While things may fluctuate from one week to the other for a while, Google Chrome will eventually overtake Firefox by a safe enough margin, in a matter of weeks based on Statcounter data, or months based on other data, such as NetApplications.

Of course, even though the large trends have been relatively stable, Internet Explorer is losing market share, Chrome is gaining, Firefox isn't going anywhere, nothing is set in stone.

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