Global roundup – this week’s top stories

Google Plus

The top news this week is obviously Google Plus, Google’s new social networking service. It generally seems to be liked so far. Using it for a just a few hours, our first impression is that the service is a serious competitor and performs way better than Facebook on many fronts, especially on sharing stuff with just the right group of friends.

The look is, well, clean for starters, and Orkut-ish too (can’t say yet if this is good or bad). We haven’t used it enough here to have a real opinion on how it measures against the current king of social media. We’re trying it out and will have something to post about this next. In the meantime, you can read the following reviews:

First Night With Google Plus: This is Very Cool – ReadWriteWeb

Google Plus Review: Fun, interesting and totally empty – Washington Post

Good First Sign: I Have A Strong Desire To Keep Using Google+ – TechCrunch

And by the way, if you still haven’t received a Google+ invite yet, just mail us with your Gmail address on admin@techzim.co.zw and we’ll drop you one. Or maybe if you have the means, you can buy one on eBay.

Opera debuts in Swahili and Zulu

Opera Software, makers of the popular mobile internet browser, this week released an update to its web browser available for the first time in the Africa languages Swahili and Zulu. The new version includes 4 new languages and has improvements to the Speed Dial feature.

You can read more about it here.

Microsoft Office in the clouds

On Tuesday Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Office 365, a cloud version of its office desktop software. Microsoft enters a market dominated by Google right now, which has had office applications on Google Apps available for some time now.

update: Google’s has closed Google+ out to more invites so we can’t send any anymore. Sorry.