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Google Plus gets 41 new features
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The 41 new features
being added to Google Plus beginning Wednesday will draw upon the computing
power, machine learning, algorithms, semantics analysis and other innovations
that established Google's search engine as the most influential force on the
Internet.
The most compelling
new attraction may be a new photo-management tool that promises to test how
much control people want to cede to computers. It will also further blur the
lines between a real moment in time and augmented reality.
Google promises the
feature will pick out the best shots from a wide assortment of photos. The
automatic photo selection is done by calling upon Google's knowledge of the
elements that make up a visually pleasing picture, coupled with facial
recognition technology and a vast database that helps tie together the
relationships of people appearing in a photo. Google says its computers will
recognize the best photos featuring family members or close friends of a person
who uploads a bunch of pictures to Plus.
If the photos don't look quite right, Google
is promising to enhance them, taking over a job that typically requires people
to buy and master special photo editing software such as Adobe System Inc.'s
Photoshop, Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa. Computer-controlled editing tools
will automatically remove red eyes, soften skin tones, sharpen colors and
adjust contrast. Google offers something similar through an "I'm Feeling
Lucky" button on Picasa.
In an effort to get
more photos onto the Plus network, Google is offering to back up all pictures
taken on a mobile device, as soon as they're snapped. To accommodate the
increased volume, Google Plus will now provide each account holder with up to
15 gigabytes of storage for full-resolution photos. Gundotra believes Plus'
management tools will be compelling because they are designed to save people
the time and trouble of choosing and editing photos. Google Plus users will be
able to compare all original photos with the versions altered by computers. The
auto-enhancement tool can also be turned off.
Another new photo
feature promises to stitch together a sequence of photos taken of the same
group of people or a panoramic scene. This stitching system can be used to
create a single photo that pulls the best shots of everyone featured in a
series of pictures. It will also produce an animated clip featuring the motions
of people captured in a succession of photos taken against the same background.
By appealing to people's photo fondness, Google is hoping to make Plus a more
useful and fun place to hang out than Facebook. But Google Plus still hasn't
proven it can become as much of a magnet as Facebook, largely because people
had already established their online social circles at Facebook.
Google Plus has built
up a broad swath of accountholders since its introduction nearly two years ago,
mainly because so many people already had set up Google logins while using the
company's Gmail or other services. Gundotra announced Wednesday that Google
Plus now has 190 million users who interact on the service each month, up from
135 million in late December. About 390 million people log in to Google Plus
each month, but that includes a large number who have tied their Gmail accounts
to the social networking service. Facebook says it has about 1.1 billion active
users.
As such, Google has a
long way to go. Facebook has claimed the title of being the world's largest
photo-sharing site for years, and with last year's purchase of Instagram only
propelled it further ahead. Instagram has 100 million monthly active users, up
from 22 million when Facebook agreed to buy it last spring. Rather than offer
powerful editing tools or high-quality pictures, Facebook became the most
popular way to share the photos online simply because it is the most popular
place to hang out online. Today, users upload more than 350 million photos to
Facebook each day.
Over the years, it
enhanced the quality of the photos displayed, too, and has recently redesigned
its site to make photos more pronounced. Instagram, meanwhile, offers an
easy-to-use mobile app and playful filters users can apply to snapshots of
friends, quirky buildings or plates of food. Google Plus is getting a new look
just two months after Facebook spruced up its news feed - the centerpiece of
its service - to feature photos more prominently and generally make posts look
more like articles in a magazine or newspaper. Unlike Facebook, Google says
there are no current plans to show ads on the revamped Plus.
In another change
aimed at attracting more traffic, Google Plus will start to display automatic
hash tags to identify the main topic being discussed in a post or featured in a
photo. Google is using its understanding of semantics and photo-scanning
technology to figure out what is going on. Individuals will still have an
option of editing or forbidding a hash tag from appearing if they don't agree
with Google's automatic selection. Clicking on the hashtag will take Google
Plus users to other posts and pictures bearing the same marker. Similar content
being shared by family and friend is supposed to show up first, thanks to the
same ranking system that Google's search engine uses to pick out the most
relevant results. Facebook doesn't currently use hash tags, though there have
been reports that it is working on incorporating them to its site, just as
Twitter and Instagram already do.
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