What’s in store for Google+

Google+ is gaining momentum with each passing day but the search giant isn’t content with resting on its laurels. Google is aware that it’s facing an uphill battle if it wants to dethrone Facebook so they’re iterating and rolling out new features like crazy. Here’s a quick overview of the more notable enhancements coming soon to Google+.

Rohit Khare, who was added to Google social team following the Angstro acquisition in late 2010, announced that an address book uploader will be rolling out to everyone over the next few days. This will let you export your friends list from other social services in the standard CSV or vCard formats, without messing up your other Google Contacts.

By the way, bear in mind that the folks you put into your Circles are automatically added to your Google Contacts’ Other Contacts section. Previously this week, Engineering Manager for Gmail frontend Mark Striebeck mentioned “several Gmail/Google+ integrations” and he already arranged several Hangouts to discuss the topic. And you may have heard that Google+ features for businesses are coming, too.

Go past the break for more features and a couple of clips…

And Frances Haugen, a Google+ Profiles Product Manager, also announced new privacy features that will let you control who sees your gender on your Google+ Profile. She also confirmed that Google is not currently taking down profiles with profile pictures of non-people “unless they otherwise violate our community standards (example: they shouldn’t be obscene)”. Haugen re-iterated Googlers’ belief that “using real names and real profile pictures is the best way to create that kind of environment”. Some bloggers reported that Google is taking down profiles with fake names. We reached out to Google for clarification and will update the article when we hear back from them.

Shimrit Ben-Yair, another Googler, wrote about another change rolling in over the next couple of days. “Changing your public profile picture or scrapbook photos will no longer generate a public post to the stream, just to the people you have in your circles. So only people in your circles will engage in discussions about the photos you post”, her post reads. Those are just a few of the latest confirmed enhancements coming to Google’s social thing which, by some estimates, will have 20 million users. Computerworld has a nice overview of Google+ changes from last week.

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