On June 28, Google announced its newest project: Social networking.
In a post on its official blog, Vic Gundotra, the Senior Vice President of engineering, described the inspiration and features behind Google+, the new social service Google is rolling out in small bits.
According to the post, the service is designed to bring the realistic atmosphere of social interaction found in actual physical engagements, at a pub for example, to your web browser. “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software,” says Gundotra.
The service as it is now includes five functional features to start.
The first is +Circles, a feature that allows a user to group friends into select classifications, like family or new acquaintances, by literally dragging their image into a labeled circle. The feature is meant to emulate the real circles that people define and separate for the friends and peers they have in reality, like co-workers with casual interaction or the closest people in one’s life, making it easier to share certain information with only the people a user would prefer to see it.
Google’s next + feature is their new sharing engine +Sparks. This feature uses Google’s search engine to provide topic-specific feeds full of sharable content, like articles or videos, on a user’s page or with a user’s circle.
“Great content can lead to great conversations … So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks,” says the description.
Google aims to make those conversations more natural also. +Hangouts is a feature that seeks to oust instant messaging by creating “casual meetup” rooms for live multi-person video chats. “We wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts,” says the post, “Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face.”
+Huddle is a feature that takes communication for meeting up one step further. Google plans for Huddle to be a group messaging service that will allow all members of a select circle to chat in real time from mobile devices. It is meant to make coordinating a group activity or informing all members of a circle of plans or new information quick and easy.
The final roll-out feature is +Mobile, which will integrate your away-from-keyboard experiences with your social network via mobile device as many other networks, like Facebook, have done. Google intends for this feature to be different from the rest by implementing automatic actions, like adding your current location to every post or automatically uploading every photo you snap to a private album in Google’s cloud – all with your permission of course.
Google+ is currently only available in a trial-phase that is exclusive to invited testers. However, registration is currently open for notifications and a possible future invite on the Google+ official website.
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