I’ve been using Google+ for a couple of days now, and I really like it. While I have not yet had a chance to give every feature a full run through it’s paces, I have very much liked what I have had a go with. Here’s why I think it has promise.

I am pleased to announce the free online release of my review of the impact of the social web for 2010.

This work was completed as part of a University module entitled “Social, legal and ethical aspects of engineering” (and known as SLEASE). Entitled “Social, Legal and Ethical Aspects of online Communities and Social Networks”, the report focussed on the main issues facing social networking online in the last quarter of 2010.

The report presents hundreds of reference sources, from Reddit conversation threads and TechCrunch articles through to research papers and Anonymous press releases. The report then gives a succinct summary of the activities of the Reddit Political Action Committee, Twitter’s community, the Yahoo/Delicious debacle and all of the important events of the end of the year.

A note on licensing: this report is free to download and share, but please do not extract parts from the main body of the document. A note to fellow students: this report is provided for information only – plagiarism will get you thrown out of University.

Download the report

There is always talk of where the web could go next.

Constantly seeking the next “big thing”, entrepreneurs and large companies alike are pouring time, money, and intelligence into figuring out the next cool thing that can be done with the network that has the ability to connect us all.

But where can the web go from here?

The best answer to that question can be taken from extrapolating where we’ve come from into the future. Here’s what I think will be big in the coming months and years.

Having trouble getting your thoughts into 140 characters? Try getting them into a word.

That is the principle behind Wordr, a service I came across recently and pretty much instantly fell for.

Yeah yeah, “It’s just another Twitter clone” I hear you cry. And you’d be right, it unashamedly admits this on its homepage. Its a very simple one at that, featuring just the bare-bones to get the service up and running – it seems the backend is progressing quite nicely, but I think their frontend could do with some work, as they (ironically) confirmed in a tweet.

Working in a Twitter-related company means I get to see an awful lot of Twitter (it’s part of the job, right?). As a result, I see a lot of people and companies doing great things with Social Media. But I also see some people (and companies) doing terrible, terrible things with Social Media.

So here are my personal do’s and don’ts of social media. They’re personally my opinions, not those of my employer, relatives, sentient appendages, etc. If you disagree then feel free to drop a comment and get the discussion started. After all, it’s all about the conversation.

(If you don’t read any of this, at least check out the last paragraph)