What does the future hold for Apple’s newest iPhone?

Will there be two phones? A 4s and a 5? A redesign?

All the rumors will almost drive you mad. So much speculation!

Well, now it’s time for some Spekulation.
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Sorry for the deceiving title, I don’t know the release date, but I have a really good guess.

We know now that the Google Plus App for iOs has been submitted to Apple. How long is it going to take for Apple to approve the iOs app, and will it even get through the approval process?
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I’ve been lucky enough to score an invite to Google Plus in it’s early phase with all the rest of the geek world.

For those of you who haven’t scored an invite yet, hang in there. Invites are closed for now, but I can’t imagine they’ll open it sooner than later. Surely it takes a lot less to run a service like a social network than what it takes to run Voice or Wave (which I miss horribly by the way. Anyone else?)

So far, I’m impressed. The site runs well with great load times and some slick UI elements. There’s just something cool about the green +1 circle pops out when you add someone to your circle. It’s almost like a 1 Up in a game.

The photo uploader is also really smooth. From what I’ve heard, the photos you add to your photo album on Plus are not counted toward your Google storage, just like Facebook. Nice!

Now we can just hope they add an embedding feature so we can use it for image hosting! Dream on.

I really want to try the video chat service before too long. Hopefully it’s better than Google Chat. I’ve never been impressed with that.

Everyone’s talking “Facebook killer?”, so I guess I’ll throw my hat in that ring:

It’s hard to say with Google Plus being in early testing whether or not it’s a “Facebook killer”. Facebook basically invented the social network game. Apparently (with Facebook announcing the video chat service, teamed up with Skype) they’ve known about Google Plus for a long time and have been working on something to try and steal the limelight. Bet they wished they could have stopped it altogether. Maybe not, though. Maybe they’re like me and think competition is a good thing?

You know they’re trying to protect themselves from becoming another MySpace, though. They want the the party to last forever. I know I moved from MySpace to Facebook. Look where MySpace is now. I wonder where Facebook will be in the relatively same time frame? Maybe Zynga will buy them out just so all our moms can log in and play Farmville all day. Maybe not?

Anyone planning a Plus pilgrimage yet? I’ll be honest, I’ve thought of it a few times. Almost entirely because of the games and stupid “someone answered a question about you” posts. Give me a break.

I read an article that said Google Plus is more likely to succeed because more people use Google than Facebook. I tend to agree with this. For now, there are less people on Google Plus, but once it goes public, people will really gravitate to the idea of using Google in place of Facebook.

For now, I almost feel weird talking to people about Plus. Almost no one knows what it is, but everyone knows what Facebook is. Advantage Facebook. Maybe that’ll change in time.

There are a lot of facets to Google, versus Facebook which does one thing and still really doesn’t do it that well.

Why are so many people on Facebook anyway? I’ll tell you why, because they know most of their friends are too. Google always has the Geek following (which is kind of nice for now) but if Google can’t talk people out of their Facebook comfort zone, we might be looking at another Wave. Loved by the geeks and shunned by the public. Hopefully not. (Did I mention I miss Wave?)

I’m not worried for Plus, though. Google is always innovating, experimenting, and coming up with some really cool stuff that will take Facebook a long time to implement in any scale. This is partly shown in the teaming up with Skype for video chat. Whatever features Facebook want to deploy, they’re going to have to call in others to help them out, whereas Google just buys them out and absorbs them.

In reality though, who could be expected to keep up with Google? Google’s got the funds and the server power to take on just about anyone at anything.  Really, I’m having a hard time coming up with an advantage that Facebook has over Google, other than owning the social side of the internet for so long. You’ve got to hand it to them, I see people from my family on Facebook that were scared to even use a computer five years ago. Props for that.

Overall, success of any social network is dependent upon the users as well as the developers. The network is constructed by the developers, then it’s up to the users to recruit. It ends up being a social ecosystem almost. One can’t exist for long without the others.

It’s really hard to predict who will “win” in the end? How do we call the winner anyways? When one buys the other? I don’t see that happening. I don’t see either one going anywhere.

I think the only way to measure the winner is not in the number of users on the network, but the satisfaction around the overall experience. So far, I have to say, Google Plus is winning in my eyes.

I’ve always favored simplicity. Only time will tell if Google Plus gets as cluttered and complicated as Facebook.