In the last few days, Google has introduced three new integrated features into its social network (or “identity service” according to Eric Schmidt), Google+: Hashtag auto-complete as the user start typing it, adding text into photos and the option to record and attach video to status updates.
Although non of these new features isn’t as exciting and innovative as the new Facebook Timeline apps that have been presented yesterday, they are still pretty good additions that do improves the social networking site (or whatever they want to call it) at least slightly.
What was even more interesting (in a way) than the new features themselves was the fact that they all introduced by Google employees in their Google+ accounts! But I guess that after the new Search Plus Your World concept, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise… Anyways, let’s go over the new features:
Hashtag Auto-Complete
Google’s developer and the original inventor of the Hashtag, Chris Messina, has introduced a new feature that enables an auto-complete of Hashtags for easier sharing across the Google+ community. From now, whenever typing # in the Google+ sharing box, it will try to guess automatically what Hashtag (or a list of Hashtags) you were going to write.
From prior experience of the auto-complete service on the search engine, this will certainly be a much easier way for tagging. To see exactly how it works, you can watch to following short video:
Adding Text To Photos
This new feature that presented by Google’s software engineer, Colin McMillen, is allowing users to add bold text in different fonts into the user’s photo in three locations- the top, middle or bottom and to align it to the center, left or right side of the photo.
To add text to a photo, after the user is uploading a photo to the sharing box, he can click on the “Add text” link below the photo and then he would be able to customize the text.
Record and Share Video Status
The last new feature which was announced by another Google’s software engineer, Shana Gitnick, is allowing users to record a video (by using a webcam) and to publish it immediately to the user’s Circles. This makes it a lot more easier to share a video status and basically skips over the YouTube-uploading step.
To post a video status, the user clicks on the “Add a video” icon on the sharing box and chooses “Record video” and then, he’ll need to grant access to the Flash program to use his webcam. After the user finish to record, the video will be added to the sharing box as a regular media attachment.
