The Core

It's available in other countries now, not just the US.

We've settled on using it for all of our reporting.

Google Sheets, Supermetrics, and you can get pretty much any data you want in the reports.

I like it a lot.

Supermetrics is pretty good.

Also Optmyzr pulls in Adwords data but you can build reports with GA data as well and you get nice visualisations.

A bit of a tangent, but https://www.quillengage.com is good for giving you a conversational assessment of your data.

Then finally only for one account at a time (unlike Supermetrics where you can do rollups) there is the Google Analytics Sheets Addon which you can pull API data from.

You can change the country and put in a non-US address, so surely it must be anyone who did it not just American LinkedIn users.

FUD, completely groundless and these so called journalists are benefitting from classic link bait and everyone fell for it.

What about when Matt Cutts calls time on his career with Google? Will everyone say they are going to close down search?

Vic Gundotra was the "face" of Google+ and the guy who created I/O. The guy replacing him was one of the founding team and he looks like he has the skills to take things forward.

It was never, and will never be a Facebook or Twitter lookalike/wannabe.

The likelihood it has hit the tipping point and a lot of the people who got it to where it is can now be redeployed into other areas of the business that needs it. The community managers are not needed as it's a self-policing environment.

There are plenty enough evangelists not on the payroll for Google not to need to fund things.

I'm actually loving where they have got it, without bowing to pressure for things like a write API. That was a big negative when people could regurgitate the same crap on the fly via third party tools.

They have not got ads on the platform, and likely never will, they don't need to. Post Ads have just been made available to everyone with over 1000 followers and that takes Google+ outside of the platform and in to the GDN which I think is smart, as long as the advertisers realise it is not a direct response mechanism. Seeing examples from Toyota etc. won't help most people build their brand awareness and engagement.

Techcrunch should be ashamed they got reporters who know nothing about how the ecosystem at Google+ works to wax lyrical about why it was going to close because one guy decides to leave because of a life-event that made him take stock and he is likely to appear heading up somewhere like eBay or AOL or somewhere that needs him (Yahoo as Marissa Meyer no. 2?)

Once we know what he is going to do, we can see what the backdrop behind his decision was.

Head - Slap

Trackur is Andy Beal's ORM tool (Online Reputation Management).

It's pretty good, not sure that it would be a replacement for Google Reader, although to be fair I've never liked reader so pleased to see it go, they never did a jot of development work with it.

The plus side to this is that the 2005 RSS technology might lead someone (Digg possibly) to come from the pack and make a much better RSS reader that we can all adopt.

I use Reeder for the Mac/iPad etc. and they say they are working on a solution, they have some time still.

Trackur is good, I give it a big thumbs up.

Still wrong, I think you mean Facebook.

They are all evil anyway.

I have mixed feelings about the Promoted Post. Selecting important topics to get a Bump is not a bad idea, it's comparatively cheap and if the data backs out it is no different than buying Adwords or any other form of advertising. I just think people need to be smart in the way they use it and use it sparingly.

I can't remember what the solution is called but they have 500,000 items they have information on and they are showing this when someone searches for it, typically it's people, companies.

I'll see if I can get the brain to function over the weekend and put the official terminology in for you.