Google Plus

Cross posted from 9to5Mac

According to Google Employee Erica Joy, the Google + app is awaiting Apple’s approval in the App Store. It also sounds like it is a iPad univeral app.  Hopefully it gets through quicker than Google Voice which took over a year to clear the gauntlet.  Cross posted from 9to5google.com

24100   via Mashable

[UPDATE 1, July 5, 2011  8:31 Eastern]: Facebook has blocked the Chrome extension for exporting friends  Author Mohamed Mansour wrote on the extension page that “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.”

Transferring your Facebook contacts to Google+ is a bit tricky because of, you know, the walled garden of Facebook which restricts how you can take your social graph elsewhere (unlike the Google Takeout service). Some workarounds tackle the issue, like the Friends to Gmail web app which will copy your Facebook contacts to Gmail. You can also pull a similar stunt via Yahoo Mail. Both solutions, however, require that you first copy Facebook friends to an online address book and then use this data to build your social graph on Google+.

A new Chrome extensions takes the pain out of this, allowing you to continue building your Facebook relationships on Google’s social service in one easy step. It’s called Facebook Friend Exporter and right now works only with the English version of Facebook and only via standard HTTP connection (SSL Facebook isn’t supported yet). What’s best…

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Google said in a tweet four hours ago that they have temporarily disabled  a dynamic stream of real-time content in people’s search results until they figure out how to bake this functionality into their latest social service dubbed Google+:

We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned.

Trying to access the google.com/realtime web page produces a 404 page not found error. Google real-time was conceived two years ago as a way to enhance people’s search results with the latest news headlines, blog posts and updates from Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social sites. With the Google+ service the company has upped the ante in the social department so it makes sense to use Google+ to have one place to connect with your friends, share photos, links and other content as well as track updates from other social services across the web.

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Google has always integrated products, into products, into products. Google+ is no different, where we see many of Google’s product incorporated into this invite only product. One of these is Picasa, who historically only had a storage limit of 1GB, but now that Google+ is on the market things have changed. ReadWriteWeb has posted a break down on what pictures count torwards what storage.

As it turns out, there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048×2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won’t count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit.

That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048×2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized.

Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800×800 and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down.

To sum this up, any Google user can now upload unlimited pictures to Picasa as long as they’re under 2048×2048. If they’re above 2048×2048 you are given 1GB of storage, but they’ll be resized. Google+ users can upload photos up to 2048×2048 that won’t count towards the limit, and Google will automatically resize them to stay within the limits. Get storing!

Related articles

• Free storage limits – Picasa for Google+ users (picasa.google.com)
• Google Takeout lets you pull your data out of the cloud (9to5google.com)

Google+ is not yet available to the general public, but if first impressions from early adopters (read: journalists) are indicative of its potential, Google may have nailed the social thing this time. Google+ out-innovates Facebook on several aspects, including the integrated audio/video chat feature, fine-tuned sharing features, the ability to create ad-hoc networks and more. The hype and the headlines have not escaped the attention of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who figured he might as well join the damn thing and see why all the fuss.

Of course, it’s hard to establish authenticity of Zuckerberg’s alleged profile on the Google+ service, first outed by Forbes. Dana Brunetti, one of the producers of The Social Network movie, apparently added Mark Zuckerberg to his “People I did a Movie About” social circle on Google+. If it’s genuine, however, we’re giving Zuck a thumbs-up for having the guts to create a public profile on a rival network and the curiosity to explore the life beyond the walls of Facebook.

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As if it were any surprise to watchers, TechCrunch reports that Chinese authorities yesterday tapped The Great Firewall of China to block or limit access to social network Google+ from Mainland China. Quoting a Pen Olson report, the publication later added that the Chinese government didn’t block access to the service entirely. Instead, they are slowing it down to a crawl, “which essentially comes down to the same thing: censoring”. Maybe Chinese officials are trying to get even for Google calling them out publicly for Gmail hack attacks?

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By now you’ve probably figured out from our Google+ coverage that we here at 9to5Google are big fans of Google’s latest social thingie. There’s just one problem with this service: There’s no easy way to bring all your Facebook friends to Google+ because, you know, Facebook and Google are at odds with each other. Lifehacker comes to the rescue with this nifty workaround.

It involves authorizing Yahoo Mail to access your Facebook account via Facebook Connect and then transferring Facebook contacts to the Yahoo Mail Address Book. From there, you can easily import them into Google+. Alternatively, you can use the Friends to Gmail web app to bring along all your Facebook contacts to Gmail. Both solutions will transfers only contacts, not other Facebook data or your social graph you’ve been building on Zuckerberg’s social network. And should you ever want to take out your data from Google+ or any other Google property, you can use the new Google Takeout service. Zuck, you listening?

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If you attempt to sign in to Google+, the search giant’s latest social thing (coming soon to iPhone as a native app), the system will cut you off if you are not over a certain age, putting up this warning (thanks, @admhawrth):

Could not sign you in to Google+. You must be over a certain age to use Google+.

By the way, what’s a certain age anyway and why don’t they make public the age limit? Because Google+ authorizes users with their Google Account, which is widely used across other Google properties, the system can tell your age by looking up the birth date information in your account.

Of course, kids can circumvent this by creating a brand new account and lying about their age, but the vast majority of ordinary users would prefer using Google+ with their real Google identity. The fun part? You cannot change the year of birth in your Google account. Also notice how the mobile Google+ site cleverly replicates standard iOS 5 dialogue box…

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Because we love our readers so much, we’re going to give out 50, and maybe a few more, Google+ invites. To get your invite email me submit the tips field above. In the mean time, check out our notes on the new Facebook killer. For those of you who have it already, what do you think?

Update: Vic says the gate is closed today.  However, it will open up again soon.  We have your names and will try to get as many people as we can in!

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Google has announced on their Google+ information page that their new social networking service will be available as a native application for the iOS platform. Google does not provide a launch date for this application, but says it is “coming soon” to iPhones running iOS 4.0 or later. There is no mention of an iPad application at this time, but you’ll be able to run it in 2X mode like other iPhone apps. (via iPhone Italia).

Cross posted with 9to5Mac.com

So why does Google+ look so good? It’s simple; it was designed by some who used to work at Apple. Wired’s Steven Levy is reporting that Andy Hertzfeld, one of the designers from the original Macintosh, played an essential role in the design of Google+.

With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic, and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app. That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Hertzfeld.

Google+ design really is excellent. It is invite-only at the moment.  We’re taking notes in the mean time.
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Our invites came in and we’re up and running.  Here’s the initial reactions:

The first annoying thing is that Google hasn’t allowed Apps for Domains in yet.  They are “working on it”.  If you are like me and have your life in a Google Domain account this is a major pain.  I’m going to have to reconnect to everyone and they are going to have to put me in their circles all over again.  Bad start.

Once signed in, the interface is very “Facebook feeling” Google has found a lot of people who know me or are in my contacts so adding them to circles is easy.  Unfortunately my gmail.com account has a lot of people from school (when I used it last) and not a lot of the people I deal with on a day to day basis.

Friends seem to be coming in from way back in history – very Facebook like.

It will be interesting to see how Google keeps people coming in and more importantly coming back.

Because I can’t stay logged into this and my normal Apps Google account at the same time, it won’t get used very much.  I imagine there are a lot of power users in this exact same boat.  I wonder what Google’s plan for this is.  I’m hoping there is going to be a merge button at some point in the future.

Overall, I have to say that the product feels very good…like if all of my Facebook Friends came in, I’d probably leave Facebook immediately.  But how do I use both at the same time?

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI]

Along with a Flash-based demo, Google has posted many videos and an explanation of the ambitious new Plus project today.   Videos embedded below:

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MG Siegler Techcrunch, Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand and Steven Levy at Wired have a huge exposés on the Facebook killing-er marginalizing Google+ as it is now called.

It is bold, it is entirely new and it is open to some people starting today.

Update: The NYTimes and some others are also weighing in.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c]

Google has announced today that their +1 button is going global. At first Google will begin the roll out on google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, but more sites will be following shortly after.

Google is a service to recommend webpages to your friends. While they’re mainly involved with Google’s Search, the buttons are also incorporated on websites. As you’ll notice, we use it on our site.

Better news: We’ve got it on goog authority that +1 will be taking over for Buzz in our Google Reader accounts very shortly.
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