Internet15.05.2013

Google+ gets interface enhancements, Hangouts app

At the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today (15 May 2013), senior vice president of engineering for Google, Vic Gundotra unveiled some new core features in the social platform Google+. These are in the areas of Stream, Hangouts and Photos.

Google+ Stream

Google has tweaked the design of the Stream feature to align across devices and the web. The core changes are:

A multi-column layout. One, two, or three columns of content depending on your screen size and orientation.
“Awesome-sized” media. Photos and videos can now fill the entire width of the stream.
Animations. The sharebox bounces, the menus slide, and the cards flip and fade, to name a few of the new animations.

Automated Related Hashtags

Gundotra said that Google wanted to address a problem with social platform news feeds – they appear very flat, with little ability to “go deeper” into an interest. To address this, a new automated feature called “related hashtags” has been added to the stream. Gundotra explained how it works:

We’ll look at the post, determine what it’s about, and tag it accordingly (#SFGiants and #BusterPosey, in this case).
Behind the scenes, we’ll also identify and rank relevant conversations across the network.
When you click on the related hashtag, we’ll flip the card, and let you browse related content inline.

Users will have the option to remove Google-added tags from single posts or all posts.

Hangouts app

Google has released a multi-platform (Android, iOS, PC) standalone version of its Google+ Hangouts, which will allow use of text, photos and live video.

Some core features include:

Conversation history (which can be disabled).
Multi-device notification clearing.
Free video calls to single or groups of users (perhaps a sly dig at Skype’s paid group video calling).
Available from Google Play, the App Store, and the Chrome Web Store, and it’s also part of Gmail and Google+.

Automatic Google+ photo improvements

Gundotra explained that uploading good looking photos to your social feed can be a difficult task, as editing and touching up photos is the realm of professionals with expensive software. To remedy this, Google is introducing some automated features.

Auto Backup (aka Instant Upload). With user permission, Google will back up mobile pics as they are taken. Unlimited free storage at standard size (2048px), and 15GB of free storage at full size (up from 5GB).

Auto Highlight. Removing the need to sift through vacation photos to assemble an album, Auto Highlight finds the best pictures in a collection by de-emphasizing duplicates, blurry images and poor exposures, and focusing instead on pictures with the people you care about, landmarks, and other positive attributes. The Photos page on Google+ will show Highlights ready to share.

Auto Enhance. A new way to automatically improve brightness, contrast, saturation, structure, noise, focus, and many other factors. Users upload some photos, then open the lightbox to see Google’s enhancements. Changes can be undone at any time.

Auto Awesome. A Google tool that will automatically create a new image based on a set of photos in your library. Examples: a sequence of photos will become animated; a set of family portraits in which Google will find everyone’s smile and stitch them together into a single shot. This will also be done with panoramas and filmstrips.