In recent weeks, Google has launched a number of social apps through its Area 120 incubator. However, the company is also working on a first party social app that lets small groups edit pictures together with the help of computer vision.
Over the weekend, Google announced changes to Play Games permissions that are mostly meant for developers, but regular users who game on Android will also see a benefit. Players no longer need their Google accounts upgraded to Google+ to use Play Games and can now automatically be signed-in with a standard Google account.
Google has been sprucing up their web apps this week as the first new updates of 2016 start to trickle in. Inbox by Gmail on the web adds a super convenient photo and attachment picker, while Google Plus now allows users to pin posts to their profiles.
Image: Forbes
As unsurprising as it may be, an early Twitter investor came out several months to say that Google still doesn’t understand social and should buy struggling Twitter. And while that hasn’t quite happened (and we don’t really have any hard evidence that it will), it appears that ties between the two companies are strengthening. Twitter’s once-again-CEO Jack Dorsey has today announced that Google’s previous chief business officer Omid Kordestani has been appointed as the social network’s executive chairman.
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One of the many things Facebook does well is make it nearly impossible to miss when one of your friends turns another year older. On the web, birthday reminders are placed prominently near the top right with links to easily wish your pal a happy birthday, and on mobile Facebook has experimented with alerts and other ways to help you not forget someone’s big day.
Now Facebook appears to be testing an even more personal way to make your birthday wish stand out: video messages. The Next Web reports that some mobile users have seen a new ‘birthday video’ option appear under Facebook’s Birthdays section (although don’t worry if you don’t see it yet, I don’t have it either).
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It was only a month ago that Skype for Android was hit with a slight visual refresh, and today Microsoft is pushing out a much bigger redesign to the messaging app that it says was inspired by Google’s Material design. Skype 6.0 for Android replaces the custom action bar along the bottom of the app with a new floating action button that should be familiar to other modern Android apps. The action button ties in shortcuts to video messages, video calls, voice calls, and conversation chats.
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Viber has updated its Android app to add a range of improvements based on user requests, says the company. Version 5.5 allows you to start a video call directly from your recent calls list, rich links now display content previews when links are posted into text chats – and Viber says more efficient data compression has allowed it to improve the quality of both audio and video calls while reducing data usage.
Users can also now share contacts within both one-to-one and group chats, and invite an entire group to follow a public chat.
Viber is a free download from Google Play.
The great unraveling of Google+ as a fiber connecting all of Google’s products continues. Who’s disbanding this time? Well, basically all of the Google ecosystem.
Microsoft has released an updated version of Skype for Android today that delivers both a visual refresh to several parts of the app as well as performance improvements throughout.
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…confirmed with Google, that David Besbris [above] has left his role as the head of the company’s social and identity product. He has been replaced by Bradley Horowitz, a longtime VP of product for Google+.
Google Plus seems to be in tumult and it sounds like it is being dismantled for its good parts including Photos and Hangouts. Perhaps the feed will turn into a more Twitter-like product. Who knows at this point—we’ll likely get a roadmap at Google I/O in May.
As for new lead Bradley Horowitz, he never really left Google+ through Vic Gundotra’s departure and will probably oversee the split of the units which are said to have already been reduced by half.
While Google+ may not always get the attention it deserves, Google this evening has announced a useful new feature for its users. In a post on the social network, Google employee Dennis Troper announced that users can now pin posts to the top of their profiles and pages.
Facebook has announced that it will be releasing an updated version of its mobile application later today that will improve the process of sharing multiple photos in a single post. The new composer will allow users to choose multiple images from their device’s photo library or camera, then show a preview of the post with each image in the order they were selected.
From here users will be able to add captions to each photo, write an introduction for the post, or rearrange the order of the photos. The post will show up in friends’ news feeds as a photo collage rather than a horizontal group of photos.
Re/code has posted an interview with Google’s ‘new’ head of social at the company, David Besbris, after taking over from Vic Gundotra. The interview ranges in scope, but most notably it opens with a direct question about the future of Google+ with many rumors circulating that Google intends to kill off the ‘failure’.
Unsurprisingly, Besbris denies the claims and says that Google made a long-term bet. It has no intentions to drop Google+ from its offerings.
Is Google+ going away anytime soon?
We’re actually very happy with the progress of Google+, [CEO Larry Page] said this at the time that Vic transitioned that he’s going to continue working on building this stuff, that he’s very happy with it. The company is behind it. I have no idea where these rumors come from to be honest with you.
Google is investigating an issue for a number of Google Drive users this morning after rolling out an updated UI for the service earlier this year. Google confirmed the problem on its app status website noting that users on the old Google Drive interface are unable to share documents externally.
Google is marking the issue as a service disruption, which means you should still be able to access all of the service’s other features while it looks for a fix. While the new user interface is being rolled out to users already, users still on the old UI have the ability to manually opt-in to the updated Google Drive.
Earlier this month, Microsoft-owned Skype rolled out a group video calling feature to Windows tablets. The free video calling allows for calls with up to ten people, and integrates with Skype on the desktop, which has supported group video calling since April.
Today, Skype tells us that the group video calling feature will be coming to all of its mobile platforms in the future:
We’re excited about Skype group video calling and are working to bring it to more of our platforms. In the future, we’ll be enabling group video calling for all our users across more platforms – at no cost
Unfortunately, the company could not yet provide a more specific rollout timeframe. Skype has been rapidly releasing new products over the past several months, with a major redesign of the Skype iPhone app arriving a couple of months ago.
As we reported last night, Facebook’s new Slingshot app is now available for iPhone. The app briefly appeared on the App Store last week but was quickly removed. Slingshot is Facebook’s attempt at competing with the popular Snapchat messaging service.
Secret, an anonymous microblogging service that’s grown in popularity in recent months on iOS, is today announcing a global expansion alongside confirmation of an upcoming launch on Android (via TechCrunch):
Secret’s first moves outside of the U.S. will be to several English-speaking countries – namely the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.
Meanwhile, the Android launch also is still coming up but there are plenty of hints that it’s also imminent — or in the words of Chrys Bader-Wechseler, who co-founded the startup with David Byttow, Android is “well along and on the way.”
The company isn’t sharing many details on how many users it’s picked up so far, but it did note that a common misconception of the service is that it’s mostly being used by Silicon Valley insiders: “I think that one of the misconceptions is that Secret is only about Silicon Valley, but your stream is generally representative of your address book. We see secrets from all over,” Bader-Wechseler tells me. “People talk about their lives and things that are specific to the human condition.”
“We see about 75% of people who have friends on the network will come back every week,” he says. “If they participate in a conversation, 90% will come back.” Those who are returning do so a lot, opening the app between eight and 10 times each day. “You see people on the app all day basically, an interesting and a good sign.”
No word on exactly when you can expect to see the Android version, but we imagine the news will likely break first as an anonymous status on the Secret app.
Google might be preparing to release a new Gmail app for at least Android devices that will introduce a few new notable features.
Geek.com got its hands on the screenshots above that is apparently a version of Gmail for Android that Google is currently testing. It includes new Travel, Purchases, and Finance categories in addition to the Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums categories currently available. Also present is a pinning feature for making emails of your choosing remain at the top of your inbox as well as a “snoozing” feature that allows you to delay an email for a set amount of time much like hitting snooze on your alarm clock. Within a slightly tweaked UI you’ll also notice a new toggle at the top of your inbox that allows you to switch between showing pinned emails and haven them return to chronological order.
There’s always a chance the features above will never make it out of testing, but there’s also a possibility Google could be planning to roll them out to users in a future update. As always, we’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
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Twitter has announced a few new features for its Android app today. Users with the latest update to the Twitter for Android app will soon see the ability to select up to four photos at a time to upload when composing a tweet. These photos will be displayed as a collage on the tweet’s detail screen.
Along with the multi-photo support, users are also now able to tag other people in their photos. A new “who’s in these photos?” button allows you to add the username of other people in the picture. Photo tags won’t take up any characters in the body of the tweet, so the full character count will be available for composing a message.
Instagram announced today it that it has not only refreshed the design of its Android app, but that it has cut the overall size of the app in half while making the profile screen load twice as fast. According to Instagram, the new design makes more considerations for how it presents photos with devices with smaller screens in mind as well as button placement with larger displays in mind.
Instagram 5.1 is available today on the Google Play Store.
Following recent API abuse that lead to phone numbers and usernames being exposed, Snapchat, the social photo sharing app, has updated its Android app with the option to opt out of linking your phone number with your username. The feature was intended to increase social discoverability among mutual contacts, but was recently abused leading to the following update and apology:
Find Friends Improvements
This morning we released a Snapchat update for Android and iOS that improves Find Friends functionality and allows Snapchatters to opt-out of linking their phone number with their username. This option is available in Settings > Mobile #.
This update also requires new Snapchatters to verify their phone number before using the Find Friends service.
Our team continues to make improvements to the Snapchat service to prevent future attempts to abuse our API. We are sorry for any problems this issue may have caused you and we really appreciate your patience and support.
Love,
Team Snapchat
The update is available now on for Android users on the Google Play Store.
The image above is being passed around by an anonymous tipster this evening that claims to have screenshots alongside some new information about an upcoming version of Gmail for both the web and mobile devices.
According to the tipster, the update Gmail for web will have new Category tabs that organize emails into separate inboxes based on the content within (as pictured above). Examples given include Main (for family, friends and everything that doesn’t belong in another category), ‘Social’ for emails related to social networks, ‘Offers’ for promotional material, ‘Notifications’ for reservations, bills, etc, and ‘Forums’ for mailing lists and forums.
We have no way of verifying the legitimacy of the tip, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless and it will apparently also be hitting the new Gmail mobile apps when it begins rolling out this Wednesday…
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Google announced its new cross-platform messaging service called Hangouts at Google I/O yesterday, which prompted many users to wonder if Google had plans to bring SMS and messaging unification to the Hangouts inbox.
Droid Life points us to comments by Dori Storbeck, who manages the Hangouts and Chat Google+ community, which confirm integration with SMS is highly requested and coming soon.
We expect SMS integration will only be available on Android as iOS doesn’t allow the necessary hooks to pull off the feature, which makes the platform that much more appealing for fans of the Hangouts service.
Hangouts launched on the Play Store for Android and App Store for iOS yesterday, as well as Google+ or Gmail on the desktop.
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Google has updated Google+ today with a couple notable and highly requested new features for Hangouts on Air users. The first big new feature is the ability to rewind live broadcasts, allowing users to navigate back to the beginning of a broadcast regardless of when they started watching. Other improvements include higher quality video for those joining Hangouts on Air from a mobile device, as well new auto-playing broadcasts that don’t require users to refresh the page when aHangout starts.
Google did note that “it may take longer to set up your Hangout On Air. For example: the ‘Start broadcasting’ button may be grayed out for a bit, before it turns red.” That change is to provide users with enough time to get everything in place before starting the Hangout.
Google appears to have been able to implement the changes by now processing the video in real-time rather than after the fact, which also means it’s promising Hangouts will be instantly uploaded and ready to watch on YouTube the second you go off air:
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