Google has begun integrating Google+ into search results with public Google+ posts now appearing in Social Search. Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. For example, if I share a Mashable article about Google+ eliminating pseudonyms publicly on my Google+ page, users who have added me to their circles will see a note that I shared that link if they stumble upon it in Google Search.
Google+ users may notice something new on top of their streams on Thursday — a small icon signifying that Google+ Games had gone live.
The social network began offering a range of games from publishers including Zynga, Rovio and Wooga, but minutes after Google announced the offering on its Official Blog, it disappeared. It’s likely to return very soon though. “Games will be gradually rolling out so you might not see it right away,” a Google rep says.
Google Plus has yet to launch pages for brands, but that hasn’t stopped people from making comparisons with the live version on Facebook, and now so will we. JWT New York emerging media strategist Zeny Huang penned one for Mashable, focusing on brand pages, and we beg to differ.
Huang zeroed in on four topics in comparing brand pages on the two social networks: search, customization, analytics, and the fact that Google can learn from Facebook. Again, Google Plus is still in beta, and brand pages don’t exist yet, nor do some of the hypothetical features she mentioned.
Google+ has signed up 13% of U.S. adults so far and could hit 22%, in a year, passing Twitter and LinkedIn as the number two social media network, according to a new study.
The report, based on a Bloomberg and YouGov poll of 1,003 U.S. adults from July 29 to August 2, revealed that 71% percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, but that number will drop to 69% a year from now. Among people who use both services, 30% say they plan to cut the time they spend on Facebook. However, 31% of Google+ users say they’ve abandoned their Google+ accounts or never posted anything on them.
Power Google+ users — those with lots of Circles — are intimately aware of how frustrating it can be to manage them. Your most-used Circles can get hidden at the bottom of a long list. But Google+ engineer Brett van Zuiden now comes to the rescue with some welcome Friday afternoon news: You can now reorder your circles.
“We’ve been hearing that you want a way to reorder your circles — so when you add people, view your stream, or share, that list of circles is in the order that works for you,” van Zuiden writes on Google’s thriving social network. “We thought it was a great idea, and today, we’re launching this on Google+.”
After a running start, Google+‘s growth may be slowing down a bit. A report from Experian Hitwise found both traffic and users’ average time on the social network fell last week in the U.S.
Total visits to Google+ declined about 3% to 1.79 million in the U.S. for the week ending July 23 compared to the previous seven days, according to the research company. The site received 1.86 million visits the prior week. Average time on the site was down 10%, from 5 minutes, 50 seconds to 5 minutes, 15 seconds.
Google Plus is obviously still in testing mode, despite its impressive growth. But if the search-engine giant really wants to up the ante in its competition with Facebook, here are seven features the veteran social network boasts that are not yet offered by the newcomer.
The +1 button is about to get a whole lot faster, thanks to an update Google rolled out on Tuesday. “We’ve begun to roll out out a set of changes that will make the button render up to 3x faster on your site,” software engineer David Byttow said in a blog post. “No action is required on your part, so just sit back, relax, and watch as the button loads more quickly than before.”
Hey, did you hear? Google has a new social network!
It’s called Google Plus, and it’s kind of a big deal. At least, that’s what we’re being told. Over, and over, and over. Yep, Google Plus is the best thing since Facebook. In fact, it’s better than Facebook. And it’s better than Twitter. In fact, Google Plus is going to be the death of them both!
Poppycock. Not only is Google Plus one of the biggest examples of style-over-substance and over-hype that the Internet has seen, it will be prove to be absolutely no threat to the dominance of Facebook and Twitter within their respective niches.
Google+ is the newest social network on the block, and it’s gaining a lot of momentum. But it’s very much an unknown quantity for a lot of people, as many of its features are still being explored.
If you’re just figuring out Google+, this infographic depicting the features that it shares with Twitter and Facebook should help. The Tweetsmarter blog found this gem of an infographic on a post from Hutch Carpenter on Quora.
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