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The floodgates are officially opening this weekend as Google is giving everyone 150 invites to Google Plus. Pop them into your Twitter and Facebook streams to get your friends signed up.
Here’s an invite link for our readers not yet signed up (looks like ours are going pretty fast! Read more
Much like the long-forgotten Buzz social service, Google also quickly abandoned their Realtime Search feature after an agreement to display Twitter updates in search results expired on July 2, 2011. However, it seems the success of Google+ may have encouraged the team to revive the product and possibly integrate it right into search results within the Google+ stream.
Mashable reports Googler Amit Singhal told a crowd during a search panel, while “The value the product was providing was not enough,” the team is, “actively working” on reviving realtime search in one way or another. He also noted that Google+ integration and data from other social and realtime services is something the team is evaluating.
Why not just bring realtime search results right into your Google+ stream you ask? When SearchEngineLand asked the panel about a potential search engine within the recently 25-million strong service, Singhal responded, “We are on it.”
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Today ComScore confirmed Google+ has officially hit 25 million unique users less than a month after its public launch. We told you not to worry when Experian Hitwise reported a 3% decrease in traffic for the new social network and today’s report from ComScore confirms our hunch that Google might actually be on the right track.
To put this in perspective, rival Facebook took approximately three years to reach the same milestone, while Twitter took two and a half. Twenty-five million may be a long way from the more than 750 million current Facebook users, but it is certainly a step in the right direction after similar services such as Buzz have been long abandoned.
Its quite obvious Google is pretty serious about this whole Google+ Facebook/Twitter-killer thing and the incredible rate of growth should be more than enough encouragement to make it a big focus over at the GooglePlex. They have already done so by integrating the service into almost every aspect of their other services from Gmail, which SearchEngineLand notes seems to be tied to Google+ adoption, to YouTube Live integration, and rolling out updates for the Android app to both fix issues and add functionality.
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Have Google+ notifications been unreliable on your Android device? Thanks to a rather hefty update to the Android app last night, Google has now introduced much needed “improved notifications reliability”, among the other dozen or so improvements and fixes included in the update.
Version 1.0.5 of the Google+ app for Android includes some of the enhancements made to the browser version of the service such as grouping new Circle related notifications together, rather than bombarding your notifications bar with each new addition.
The notifications system is said to be more reliable in this latest update, but whether or not it will cure issues users are having with infrequent, outdated, and often non-existent notifications is yet to be seen. Even if you haven’t experienced these issues, we recommend dropping by the Market now and grabbing the 1.0.5 update to take advantage of the other handful of welcomed fixes listed below.
What’s in this version:
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A new extension called Start Google Plus brings functionality of Twitter and Facebook to Google+. The extension not only allows you to post to all three social networks, but puts Twitter and Facebook into your Google+ stream too.
Another cool feature Start Google Plus offers is the ability to import your Facebook photos. SGP is available on Chrome and Firefox. Check out a few photos of the extension after the break. (via Lifehacker)
Googler Matt Cutts has posted to Google+ while running the San Francisco marathon. The post of his time, as seen in the image above, has already received over a 160 reactions. Keep on truckin’ Matt!
