Google Plus

Google+ Social Networking Now Open to Everyone, New Features Added

20 September 2011 11:37 PM

Google opened the gates to its social network, Google+, to everyone today and rolled out more than a dozen new features to the service, many of them aimed at mobile phone users.

For 12 weeks, Google+ has been in “field trials,” Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra explained in a company blog. “We’re nowhere near done,” he wrote, “but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta.” Now anyone can go to the Google+ site and sign up for the service.

With the new "Hangouts on Air" feature, you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join in.

In addition to open enrollment, Google introduced a number of improvements to the hangout feature of Google+. Hangouts allow people to chat face to face through video. With today’s improvements, users of Android phones will be able to use hangouts on their mobiles.

Google is also expanding the online version of hangouts. Now, through “Hangouts on Air,” you can open up a hangout session and as many as nine people can join it. An unlimited number can watch the hangout session.

Hangouts is getting some extras, too. They allow you to share what’s on your computer in a hangout, scribble with friends on an online sketchpad, share Google docs, and create or join public hangouts about a topic, like the collapse of your favorite sports team or raising alpacas.

Searching, Now Made Easy
A welcome improvement for many Google+ users will be the introduction of a search feature into the social network. Now you can type words into a Google+ search box and find content you’re interested in and as well as people to connect to.

Some mobile phone improvements were announced today, too. Better text messaging (SMS) support is now available in the United States and India. Now, from your cell phone, you can post to Google+, receive notifications, and respond to group messages through SMS.

You can also +mention people in posts or comments viewed on your phone. When you do that, the person will be notified that they’re mentioned in the post or comment. And you can +1 comments, too, but only from iOS devices.

You can take care of more housekeeping of Google+ from your phone now, too. You can edit your profile photo and customize the notifications you receive on your cell, since you may not want your phone flooded with notifications while you’re on the go.

If you have an Android phone, you can now move the Google+ app to a SD card to free up the mobile’s internal storage.

Google+ Vocabulary Changes
..read more at www.pcworld.com

Google+ iPhone App Now Live In The App Store [+PHOTOS]

19 July 2011 6:02 PM

Google+

Google+’s iPhone app is now live in the App Store, and you can download the free app here. (Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. Requires iOS 3.1 or later)

From Google’s description of the app, Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Similar to the web product, Google+ for iPhone includes Circles, your stream of updated from contacts, and Huddle, for group messaging in your circles.

While the Google+ Android app was ready to go on day one, the Google+ iPhone app had remained in review with Apple. Until now, iPhone users have had to access a mobile web version of Google+ in Safari, which wasn’t nearly as feature-filled as the Android app.

It appears that the iPhone app and Android app are fairly similar in functionality except for the instant upload feature that is included in the Android app. Instant Upload automatically uploads videos and photos to your Google+ album in the cloud.

As Larry Page told us last week “Google+ now has has over 10 million users who have created profiles (after two weeks), and these users are sharing and receiving 1 billion items per day.”



Precious Google+ invitation on eBay 99 Cents

1 July 2011 12:59 PM

I am sure that Google+ is the next coming of, well, at least Facebook.

Should I get an invitation, I will definitely invite Sen. Harry Reid, Dick Cheney, Col. Ghaddafi, and Metta World Peace (formerly Ron Artest of the Los Angeles Lakers) to my Solving the World’s Problems Circle.

However, I am still feeling a touch skeptical about Google’s claim that demand for an invitation to the network is so “insane” that it has had to close it off to newcomers.

You see, fine economists believe that when demand is vast, this vastness is immediately reflected in the market. And what greater market is there than eBay?

(credit screenshot Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

So I sauntered over there to see what vast, inflated prices were being demanded by those who had been lucky enough to have been graced with a Google+ invitation.

Just a cursory look at the prices suggest that the insanity of the demand might have received some excellent and swift Freudian therapy. For it is perfectly possible to gain access to this incredible, extraordinary, new, new thing for a mere 99 cents. (I’m assuming everything on eBay is genuine. Generous, perhaps)

Indeed, as I write one seller, wilco_eba from the Netherlands, is offering his or her invitation for less than the price of a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. This is not the only seller who is offering access to Google+ for this meager figure. (Wilco_eba is even offering “free shipping”.)

The highest price I can find on eBay is the curious $17.97, which goes to suggest that perhaps the world isn’t yet tearing down doors and out its own hair in order to gain access to, um, the Hangout facility.

Perhaps, in time, being one of Google+’s in-crowd will be more precious than, say, tickets to Lady Gaga or, um, Jethro Tull.

all credit: news.cnet.com