Google+: Communities and photos

Google+: Communities and photos(googleblog.blogspot.com)

76 points by ma2xd 13 years ago | 31 comments

timothya 13 years ago |

Nice to see a groups-like feature make it to Google+ at last.

One of the best features of G+ has always been communicating with people you don't know in person, and I think this will facilitate that more around common interests. I can also see this as being useful for groups of friends or family who always want to post content to each other.

shuw 13 years ago |

I don't know if Google announced this earlier, but this post just released more granular active (I assume monthly) user numbers for G+ than I've seen:

"More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search...), and 135 million are active in just the stream."

eungyu 13 years ago | |

I thought it was very odd that Google inserted this paragraph in the beginning of a feature announcement blog post. I think it only reaffirms the inferiority complex of G+ by explicitly explaining that they are indeed a vibrant community.

dannyr 13 years ago | | |

Don't read into it much. Google announces its daily Android activations regularly and it has the largest smartphone share in the world.

Facebook does that too.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/facebook-announces-monthly-...

Remember when people knock Google for not announcing Google+ numbers? They are saying Google is announcing numbers because they are bad.

jxi 13 years ago | | |

Inferiority complex? Seems like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If they didn't, would you claim they didn't release numbers because they feel they have fewer users?

I don't think they're trying to imply anything. What's wrong with just giving you some numbers without any motivation behind it?

GavinB 13 years ago |

Early warning: I recently learned that some kids under 13 are adopting Google+. They all have gmail accounts, but their parents won't let them go on Facebook.

It's not really any different in terms of legality or functions, but parents understand (and often don't like) Facebook. So, most likely without the parents' knowledge, their kids are meeting up via Google+.

esrauch 13 years ago | |

The horror!

webwanderings 13 years ago |

I am not sure if I'm following. These Communities appear to be as same as Pages with a +Name in the URL. I thought they released the feature of Pages and the + Name a while ago. So what makes Community different?

endtime 13 years ago | |

Communities are more like Facebook groups...they have their own discussion threads, membership/ACLs, etc.

fourstar 13 years ago |

The problem with this I feel and one of the advantages of Twitter is that if a certain company controls their community page (e.g. Audi USA) and I go to post some sort of customer service complaint, they have the option of removing it. With Twitter, I can just add a hashtag or @message them and it'd be visible globally with search.

bad_user 13 years ago | |

Google+ also has hashtags, e.g... https://plus.google.com/s/%23ThorsDay/posts

And apparently you can search for anything and you'll get a realtime stream: https://plus.google.com/s/Santa%20Claus/posts

JaggedJax 13 years ago | |

You can still make a public post not in the group with +Audi or #Audi and it will function the same way Twitter does.

fourstar 13 years ago | | |

Good to know. I'm not a heavy G+ user so thanks for the explanation.

tiziano88 13 years ago | |

wait, so what prevents you from +mentioning someone or #tagging a post in G+? Communities are completely independent and orthogonal to those already existing features

toddecus 13 years ago |

Did I really want this generations monopoly in on my social data as well? If Search== Windows and Apps == Office do I really want Google having access to my social data too? A healthy skeptic, getting more and more paranoid....

RivieraKid 13 years ago | |

I like Google but I'm starting to have similar concerns. Google could possibly become dominant search, mobile, social, browsers and more. I'm not afraid (yet) that Google will abuse their power but that kind of monopoly would be unhealthy...

hyperbovine 13 years ago | |

Don't post private information online and you should be fine.

sp332 13 years ago | | |

Maybe the fact the Google knows what my friends search for and email each other about means they know more about me than I'm comfortable with them knowing.

AndrewHampton 13 years ago |

Anyone know why the photo app (Snapseed) is only Android 4.0+?

tartuffe78 13 years ago | |

Checking it out, I don't see anything in the app that seems to be dependent on 4.0+ features, though obviously things are easier if you can use the latest and greatest APIs.

I'm guessing that it was more of a support issue. Switching to 4.0+ drops the number of devices you have to support dramatically, and with that the headache of all of the obscure device users giving you 1 stars and angry emails.

The team I'm on is transitioning from 2.3+ to 4.0+ support for some technical reasons, but easier development and support is a huge bonus.

ZeroGravitas 13 years ago | |

Just a guess but I think I saw better render script support for image filters mentioned as a recent feature.

mudrast 13 years ago |

Still nothing for Google Apps users.

Ironlink 13 years ago | |

Works fine for my Google Apps domain. Are you sure it isn't disabled in your Apps control panel? http://i.imgur.com/emsHH.png

This setting is at: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/DOMAIN.TLD/CPanelHome#Organi...

notatoad 13 years ago | |

When you say nothing do you mean nothing special, or do you mean that you can't access G+ at all from google apps? Because on both of my apps accounts, google+ works just fine.