Tech news round-up: From Google+ to Google-

We here at Memeburn know you our esteemed reader. Being the busy people you are we know that – try as you may, and as interested as you are — it’s not always possible to keep up with everything. In light of that, here’s your weekly roundup of all the important — and at times not so important — tech and online news items from the week.

All Google+ed out

How does one even begin to digest the tsunami of Google+ news this week? Well, of course you look to Memeburn. Here’s what we’ve looked at this week:

• How or if Google+ will make money
• Beyond the novelty factor, will G+ truly represent a danger to Facebook?
• What the “gurus” of social media had to say about G+
• Whether Google can finally claim victory over social media with 20 million users in less than a month.
• And for those of you who recently discovered the pen — hope you can see through the smugness — we also had 10 tips and tricks for Google+.

As much as we sought to give you the total overview of G+, we must admit failure. None other than “Hitler” had points we failed to see.

Though we’re all Google+ed out — for now — clearly there are more questions to be answered, and you can expect us to do just that.

South Africa takes to Twitter for fuel

Annual strike season in South Africa is in full swing and, as reported in the Financial Times, the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Unions and the General Industries Workers Union (SA has unions for everything) downed their petrol pumps. This led to the closure of 200 petrol stations in the Gauteng area. As stations started to run out of fuel, drivers took to Twitter to vent their frustration under the hashtag #nopetrol.

Some people however applied a little more grey matter to the problem.

An enterprising tweeter, @Oh_R_Thambo_Air, turned that all around, and started the hashtag trend, #gotpetrol. Oh_R_Thambo_Air got this tag to be a top trending topic in South Africa by “networking through great guys like @PigSpotter and @RubyGold”, he said, which people used to let others know where you could find fuel.

Hey look, isn’t that the Wikileaks guy?

Following an uncharacteristic period of silence or — dare we even imagine it without angering him — media disregard, self-styled voice of the 21st century and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made his return to the limelight. However, this wasn’t the limelight the “pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious” Assange has gotten used to. What was that mention of Assange being a 21st century Mandela again?

Following a February ruling that he was to be extradited to Sweden to face a number of sexual misconduct charges, the appeal against that ruling began in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. As The Independent noted in its report on the hearing, “not a word was said about the international storm created by the publication of classified documents on WikiLeaks”.

Most reports – from the Guardian to (expectedly) The Daily Mail — chose to focus in varying levels of sordidness on the details of the alleged sexual assaults.

On a side note, Assange’s starring role in this this spoof video around the suing/not suing/suing again Wikileaks vs Mastercard and Visa saga went pretty much unnoticed.

Zuckerberg says Google-

In an awkward occurrence, Mark Zuckerberg, the “infamous” Facebook CEO, shortly after signing up for Google+, shot up the rankings to become the Lady Gaga of the rival social network. However, just as reports of this started coming out — Forbes’ noting the somewhat less than thrilled expression on his profile — he just as quickly disappeared from Google+.

Using data from social media metric site, Social Statistics, the Atlantic Wire said of Zuckerberg’s followers (or should that be “circle-ers”), “soared to over 134,000 before Zuckerberg cranked up the privacy settings on his Google+ account and effectively disappeared from the network”. Atlantic Wire of course does note the obvious irony of he who announced the death of privacy doing this.

But wait, the plot thickens: Just as quickly as he disappeared off Google+, Zuckerberg was back, kind of…

Though he edited his G+ settings to allow us to see him to show off how many circle-ers he had, if you think you can add him and see what musings an Accidental Billionaire has, think again. You wont see a thing.

It seems Zuckerberg has taken this interpretation of G+ to heart: