Items tagged with google plus
Sing it with us now: 'Turn out the lights, the party's over. They say that all good things must end. Let's call it a night, the party's over. And tomorrow starts the same old thing again.' Willie Nelson didn't know it at the time, but he was singing about Google+, or at least that's the case if you're a fan of the social network. Not enough people were, and so starting on February 4, Google will begin turning out the lights. Google announced several months ago that it was planning to shutter Google+ on the consumer side. The company cited "low usage and engagement" as the primary reason, which translates into Google+ not being nearly as popular as Facebook. However, the straw that finally broke...
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Stick a fork in Google+, the social network is done, finished, finito. Or as Google more delicately puts it, the company is "sunsetting" the consumer version of Google+, a decision that tens (and maybe even dozens!) of users will find upsetting, given the seconds and minutes they have put into the social network when not using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. We're slightly exaggerating, of course, though "low usage and engagement" certainly factored into the decision. In a blog post announcing the closure, Google said that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds. Think about that. Nine of out 10 times someone uses Google+, they are there for about...
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Despite its best efforts, Google hasn't exactly rocked the social media world, not with its Google+ venture or any of its side operations. That's not to say Google+ is irrelevant, but it's no Facebook or Twitter. To help change that, Google recently hired Chris Poole, otherwise known online as "moot," founder of the wildly popular 4chan website. "Today I'm excited to announce that I've joined Google. When meeting with current and former Googlers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm—as well as a universal desire to share it with others," Poole stated on his blog. "I'm also impressed by Google's commitment to enabling these same talented people to...
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There's too much fuzzy math involved in figuring out exactly how many people are on Google+, but whatever the actual figure is, Google would like it to be higher. To help achieve that goal, Google is giving its social network a total overhaul, one that will put the focus squarely on two distinct features, Communities and Collections. "Today, we’re starting to introduce a fully redesigned Google+ that puts Communities and Collections front and center," Google stated in a blog post. "Now focused around interests, the new Google+ is much simpler. And it’s more mobile-friendly—we’ve rebuilt it across web, Android and iOS so that you’ll have a fast and consistent experience whether you are on a big...
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Google is getting ready to say goodnight to Google+ Photos (oh no!) as the service is set to expire on August 1, 2015, but Google Photos will live on (phew!). Confused? It's all about the "+" symbol. The photo service that Google is shutting down is the one that's built into its Google+ social network, while the one it's going full steam ahead with is its standalone Google Photos service launched back in May. While it's unlikely Google would ever state this publicly, the shuttering of Google+ Photos is partially an admission that its social network isn't on the level of Facebook, or even close. Had Google+ taken off the way the company hoped it would, the standalone Google Photos service probably...
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If Pinterest's developers appear a little red around the cheeks, you can assume they're blushing. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it's inevitable that Google's new Google+ Collections will draw comparisons to Pinterest, both of which center around pinning things that are of interest to you, like cats or cars and so forth. Collections began rolling out yesterday even before it was officially announced. To the best of our knowledge, it's not a staggered release, as Google sometimes does with its services, so you should be able to use and browse Collections now. Just head over to your Google+ account and look for the new Collections tab in the pull-down menu on the left-hand...
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Top level talent is hard to come by in the tech sector, so it's not unusual to see major players jump from one company to the next. It can sometimes be pretty cutthroat in Silicon Valley, though in other cases, engineers and other high level workers sometimes simply need a change after burying themselves in a project. We're not sure which is the case for Dr. Babak Parviz, creator of Google Glass, but he's jumping ship to go work for Amazon. Parviz hinted at the change in a status update on his Google+ page that simply said, "Status: super excited!," followed by a smiling emoticon and a picture of Amazon's logo. That in and of itself wouldn't be enough to confirm his new employment, though if...
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Life is a funny thing. What seems important one day and consumes all of our time and energy eventually fades into another chapter of our past. Sometimes it takes a major event to put these moments and decisions into perspective, and so it happened that way for Vic Gundotra, the driving force behind Google+, who today announced he is leaving the company. The death of his wife's uncle in a tragic accident served as a catalyst for his decision to leave Google. A truck hit and killed the man as he was riding his bicycle in L.A. to get lunch. During the memorial service, the man's daughter told a story about how she and her dad would talk every day on the phone, but rather than start each call with...
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There's a general perception out there that Google's social network is a virtual ghost town, versus Facebook's online playground, which is always bustling with activity. Google's tried to dispel that notion on occasion by revealing user stats, and if you look closely at the latest numbers, you might be surprised at just how busy Google+ is these days. Tina Courtney-Brown at SiteProNews did some digging and discovered that Google+ is now home to over 1 billion registered users, which compares favorably to Facebook's 1.19 billion. It's true that Google+'s stats are somewhat artificially inflated due to Google integrating accounts for its various services. However, Courtney-Brown says over 540 million...
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Privacy advocates take note, Google is rolling out a new feature to Gmail that allows your Google+ connections to email you even if you've never shared with the sender your email address. The assumption on Google's part is that you're familiar enough with your Google+ contacts to exchange emails, and by implementing this feature, you can avoid situations where you're halfway through an email draft before realizing you never actually exchanged email addresses with the intended recipient. Now, before anyone goes into a privacy panic, there are some things you should know. First, your email address still isn't visible to a Google+ connection, unless you send that person an email. Likewise, that...
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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, both Facebook and Google should be blushing from cheek to cheek. After the introduction go Google+, the two social networking services have been copying features from each other, inadvertently helping the other to innovate and improve upon their own social playground. It's still happening, too. Witness, for example, a new feature on Google+ in which posts that are +1'd by people in your circles will appear on your feed. Facebook already does this by highlighting posts your friends like. On Google+, the person or people who +1'd a particular post that shows up on your feed will be displayed above the highlighted post. In doing so, you're exposed...
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George Carlin said it best, we all "need a place to put our stuff." Carlin likened the entire meaning of life as just finding a place to put your stuff. Well it seems the folks at Google understand this age old wisdom as well and as such will be launching a new service. Google Mine will soon be integrated with Google+ so that users can share their belongings with friends in circles they so designate. The new service will also allow G+ users to "rate and review" items as well, so that anyone in your Google+ stream that you allow, can see the items and your opinion of them. Reportedly there is also an Android app on the way for Mine, which seems like a natural of course, for sharing...
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Good things tend to come to those who are famous. And if you're one of the high and mighty, you now have more more vain reason to turn to Google+. The company has just announced that vanity URLs will be available to "verified accounts," with other profiles to follow suit "over time." Basically, this is following a move by Facebook to allow users to select a URL username to follow the host name and backslash. The custom URLs are being rolled out now to select celebrities and companies, but the simpletons are simply told to "stay tuned." If you're looking for that level of vanity right now, Facebook will let even the non-celebs grab their own....
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Call Google+ a ghost town if you wish, but in terms of customer satisfaction, it's standing head and shoulders above Facebook, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report released on Tuesday. The report highlights customer happiness on a scale of 1-100, and Facebook, which was already the lowest-scoring e-business company, fell in favor even more in this latest edition, dropping 8 percent to 61/100. Google+, meanwhile, posted a respectable score of 78/100 on its first appearance in the ACSI scale. The reasons, ACSI says, have to do with an absence of traditional advertising and a superior mobile experience compared to Facebook. In contrast, Facebook users frequently...
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