Not too long I opened Twitter, well Hootsuite to be precise, to find the following sponsored tweet at the top of my feed.

“We screwed up and we’re sorry.” It’s not every day you see a tweet like that, let alone one that a company paid for. Yet, this tweet is perhaps one of the best investments Airbnb could have made. It serves to me as proof that when you do something wrong, and everyone knows it, the best thing is to own up to your failure and take responsibility.

If you’re not familiar with the saga of Airbnb, it’s worth taking a look back at the company that had previously received nothing but glowing praise from bloggers and journalists.

The company offers a cool service that lets you rent out your apartment for short periods to people who are traveling or who might just need a place to stay. It gives everyone the opportunity to earn a bit of money from an empty apartment and offers people the opportunity to find comfortable, affordable lodging.

But apparently, renting out your apartment to complete strangers on the Internet also exposes you to potential robbery and identity theft. That was the experience of EJ, a blogger who rented out her apartment through Airbnb only to find it ransacked upon her return. All of the effluent praise quickly turned to a veritable flood of bad PR. Another victim came forward soon after and Airbnb found itself up to the ears in hot and cold running PR nightmare.

So what do you do when this happens? See the tweet above. Airbnb apologized, profusely, and took several public steps to safeguard their users. Whether this resolves all of the problems remains to be seen, but I think Airbnb handled this as well as can be hoped considering how bad it had gotten.

Now it’s one thing to have a problem with your service, and then apologize. It’s another thing entirely to create a problem through a poorly planned public statement delivered via a blog post. Such was the case with Google.

About a month ago Google was on the losing end of a bidding war for a massive collection of patents from communications firm Nortel. Google went up against a consortium of Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and RIM, or basically every company that Google would want NOT to win those patents.

About a month later, Google wrote a blog post detailing how it was facing “a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.” Apparently, Microsoft (and others) didn’t like this post very much and responded with a tweet of their own, “Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.”

Someday, when the history of the early 21^st century is written, this tweet will be known as the shot that started the social media wars. And what an interesting war it was. The Internet practically blew up with posts and tweets flying back and forth with each side accusing the other of spin and twisting the facts. TechCrunch provided very entertaining coverage of the whole thing, and I highly recommend checking out their posts (it’s also worthwhile if you’d like to see the word ‘giddy’ defined in blog form).

A short time after this it looks as if Google was on the losing end of the war, with posts from MG Siegler and John Gruber that were both highly critical of Google. Gruber also linked to one of the most critical posts I have ever seen concerning Google.

The bottom line is that in the last few days Google has been raked over the coals from all different corners of the web. It’s hard to say whether they deserved this wave of criticism on all manner of subjects, but it can’t be argued that they didn’t invite it with their very public challenge to the tech industry.

With the nature of media as it is today, you need to be very prepared for the repercussions of the communications you release. Google picked a very public fight that they didn’t absolutely have to. Airbnb, on the other hand, was desperately trying to control a PR situation that they didn’t directly create. The contrast between the two publicity storms couldn’t be more striking. One was painful, but necessary. The other was painful, and painfully stupid.

Jonah Balfour received his B.A. in English and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has diverse experience in communications and journalism and honed his skills in marketing writing while working at SPEEDbit. Jonah is an avid fan of technology and social media with a special interest in all things Apple. He is also a committed Trekker and owns the Star Trek: Technical Manual, the complete blueprints to the Starship Enterprise (D), and an old copy of the Klingon dictionary.

For the last few days I’ve been checking out Google+ and I must say I am quite impressed with the interface, real time updates, and of course the circles. When you go into the platform, you almost need to double-check that you’re on Google+ and not Facebook as the interface looks very similar. But has a lot of cool funky additions as well which I will go into more in detail below.

So here are my top 10 insights as far as Google+ so far:

1) Google+ came to take the place of Facebook and Twitter, no doubt about it. And it may just do so. This has happened before. But it won’t happen so quickly or easily. It will take a long time to capture the hearts and minds of 750 million users.

2) It’s completely ridiculous that Google Apps doesn’t currently work with Google+. Yes I know it’s coming. But to launch Google+ like this, in my mind, is not savvy at all. End of story, no debate (as my buddy @GaryVee would say). Think about it: Who uses Google apps? Google’s clients and power users. Yeah, let’s disable them from using Google+. That makes a lot of sense.

3) With Google’s search capabilities, Google+’s search is going to be outstanding. Facebook must start working on its search capabilities and quickly.

4) Google+ is rolling out its messaging functionality slowly, so not everyone has it yet. However even for those who have the feature, they will find that the messaging system lacks basic email features which Facebook already has (i.e. attachments).  I am certain that at some point Google will find a way to integrate it’s Google apps for businesses and Gmail for the rest of the users with outstanding mail capabilities built into the platform.

5) Users have always complained about the inability to separate their professional and personal identities on Facebook. Google+ enables users to share different information with different circles. So you can share a funny video with your friends, a professional article with your work colleagues and a photo of your newborn with your family. This is the reason that makes Google+ Circles a more user-friendly tool for the workplace as well, in comparison with Facebook.

6) Google could very easily enhance its Android offering with specific perks and features only to be provided on Android devices.

7) There are currently no commercial brands that I came across on Google+. No form of advertising either, though I am certain that it’s coming.

8 ) On Google+’s mobile version, there is the ability to check out Nearby streams. The fact that users can receive an organized stream based on geo-location is a killer feature.

9) Hangouts (pictured right) is also a stellar feature. Google+ makes it easy for users to watch Youtube videos together with their friends and we can think of a million and one ways that Google will develop this feature even further.

10) With so many top entrepreneurs snooping around Google+, it’s hard to overlook its potential.

Here’s just a short list:

• Larry Page, +Sergey Brin – Google
• Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
• Tom Anderson – MySpace
• Pavel Durov – VKontakte
• Evan Williams – Twitter
• Reid Hoffman – LinkedIn
• Paul Buchheit – Friendfeed
• Chad Hurley – YouTube
• Michael Dell – Dell
• Mark Pincus – Zynga
• Caterina Fake – Flickr
• Adam D’Angelo – Quora
• Anne Wojcicki – 23andMe
• Drew Houston – DropBox

Kudos Google. You impressed us plus one.

Quick tip: If you’re on Google+, you probably noticed your ugly URL with lots of digits. This is Google’s way of avoiding letting spammers get a hold of your email details. But alas! You can already get your vanity URL using the gplus.to tool. I’ve already gotten my URL.

Many people are tired of Facebook and happy to embrace a new platform, although many believe that Google+ will not succeed because people don’t want to work hard and start adding their friends, relatives, colleagues to Circles.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook responds to all the buzz around Google+ (no pun intended). We hope that Facebook is up to the challenge and will give Google a strong fight:

Google has already begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages, so if you couldn’t find a reason to create your own Google profile a month or so ago, perhaps this will spur the urge. After all, most of us want to be found on a Google search, right? Google also claims to offer greater control over exactly what people find when they search for your name. So, I think it’s safe to say that Google is most likely looking to compete with Facebook and Linkedin for searches on names, locations and employment, and if Google will add the tool to link to friends profiles, they will have pretty much created a basic social network. Not bad, but can they really compete with the well established social network kings? Uh hum, Twitter?

Last year around election time, Google teamed up with Twitter to create a live moving mapplet of everyone’s political tweets. Recently, Google added a tip in your Google profile editor, that you should use Twitter to promote your Google profile. Now, there are rumors now that Twitter and Google are in serious talks. What does this mean for Google? If Google can maneuver its way into a Twitter collaboration that could beat Facebook, would that churn out a new winner?