Social | Cheryl Waller

Google+ Gets A Refresh For Android To Mirror Its 41 Update Extravaganza From I/O, Adds New Location Section

May 20, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, location, mobile, Photos, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, stream, TC

YouTube Turns Eight As Platform Surpasses More Than 100 Hours Of Video Uploaded Per Minute

May 19, 2013 by Jordan Crook Leave a Comment

YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air.

A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains strong as ever. YouTube announced that its community now uploads more than 100 hours of video to the platform every minute. Minute. That’s the equivalent of four days worth of video every sixty seconds.

But of course, the supply makes sense when you consider the demand. YouTube claims that more than one billion people across the world come to YouTube for content each month, which comes out to nearly one in every two people who have access to the internet.

Here’s a little perspective on growth: Two years ago, YouTube revealed that users were uploading 48 hours of video each minute, and last year it had grown to 72 hours. Eight years in, YouTube is still a growing platform, while Facebook may be slipping amongst younger and fresher social niche applications.

Meanwhile, YouTube opens up new possibilities for startups who want to leverage its massive, active user base and content library. Telecast, in particular, comes to mind, as the betaworks company helps makes all those billions of videos discoverable and curated on mobile devices.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about it, in the official blog post:

And so, on our eighth birthday, we’d like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren’t sure what they’ll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, startups, TC, YouTube

Google Unites Gmail And G+ Chat Into “Hangouts” Cross-Platform Text And Group Video Messaging App

May 15, 2013 by Josh Constine Leave a Comment

Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage.

For over a year, whispers from GigaOm, Droid Life and others signaled Google would undertake a big unification of its fragmented messaging offering. Today Google will offer new free iOS and Android Hangout apps, the Google+ integration, and you can upgrade from Google Talk to Hangouts by clicking on your photo in the Gmail chat list. There are currently no plans for other platforms like Windows Phone or Blackberry.

Google’s Vic Gundotra said at I/O today in San Francisco that “Technology should get out of the way so you can live, learn, and love.” Operating systems and devices shouldn’t matter. You just want to talk with those you care about. That’s the point of the revamped Hangouts. It brings humans and conversations to the forefront.

Hangouts Is The Messaging Kitchen Sink

Presence, Circles, And Delivery

Let’s take a closer look at the features Hangouts offer. Presence, or knowing when friends are available to chat, is a big focus. You can see when friends are on Hangouts, if they’re currently typing, and if they’ve seen your messages [also known as read receipts]. Using Google+ Circles, you can select specific friends or a whole group to start a chat with.

Hangouts takes care to deliver your messages to whichever web interface or mobile app your friends are using. If you’re offline, Hangouts will store your messages until you return. Unlike Google Talk, it won’t send you an email every time you get a message while offline. It only pings you by email if someone starts a conversation with you while you’re away. Hangouts won’t send you duplicate notifications on different platforms, and you can snooze notifications all together if you need some quiet time.

The idea is that you can start, stop, and restart a conversation as you move between platforms, and you can chat with friends across the desktop, Android, and iOS devices.

Text, Emoji, Photos, And Video

Of course you can send simple text messages, but where Hangouts shines is in vivid multi-media communication. To spice up your words, you can add any of 850 hand-drawn emoji. You can send photos in Hangouts, which are saved to a saved to a Google+ album that you and you conversation partners can view, edit, and share later. In fact, you can go back and view your photo and messaging history at any time, or you can turn history off so your dispatches aren’t saved.

The crown jewel of Hangouts is its namesake’s video chat. You can talk face to face with up to 10 friends at once. When you’re in a video chat, you’ll see who is talking in a big window while the rest of your chat partners are shown in tiles below. Friends’ Hangouts will ring when you call them, and they’ll get notified if they miss the digital meetup.

But Hangouts video isn’t just a group FaceTime. Google added a bunch of bells and whistles. You can add visual and sound effects or make use of special Hangouts apps. So if you want to wear a virtual pirate hat or set off some fireworks, you can. You can watch YouTube videos simultaneously with friends while laughing together, and take screenshots to capture moments for later.

No SMS, Yet

The biggest feature missing from Hangouts is the ability to send and receive SMS messages to and from friends who don’t have a Hangouts app installed. This means Hangouts isn’t truly universal. Several of its competitors allow it, including Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger For Android (but not for iOS).

So if you want to pull mom into a Hangout, you might have to send her a standard SMS from your phone and tell her to install the Hangouts app. That could be significant stumbling block. However, Google tells us SMS support is one of the most requested features from Hangouts testers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in a future update.

Oddly, Google tells us that in some countries, feature phone users, but not smartphone users, can participate in Hangouts via SMS. This should help it reach more people in the developing world, a core area for growth of messaging apps.

Other missing features include voice messages or VoIP, but you could just use a video call without looking at the screen to approximate voice calling. There’s also no Hangouts On Air broadcasting to YouTube yet.

Why Google Needs Unified Messaging

The messaging space has become a battleground recently with independent messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line competing with Apple, Facebook, and Google to rule private communication. Everyone wants to become the high-tech successor to SMS.

For Google, messaging could create a wealth of engagement and monetization options. Of course Google could monetize Hangouts directly by cramming ads in it somewhere, or selling special effects for video chat and stickers for text.

A stronger, cross-platform chat experience in Gmail could boost time spent there, where Google already shows ads. It could also finally give people a real reason to use Google+.

Most importantly, though, Hangouts could humanize Google. Still viewed as a search and ads company, people don’t think about it first when they want to socialize. Hangouts leverages all of Google’s powerful technology to bring people closer together.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, Google Messenger, io2013, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, TC

Google+ Redesigns Its Stream To Include Multi-Column Google Now-Esque Cards, Auto-Hashtags And More

May 15, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Google+, the social layer that Google introduced almost two years ago, has evolved quite a bit since its launch. Today, the company announced a complete redesign, taking cues from the mobile experience that has drawn positive feedback from those who don’t even use the service. In total, Google has launched 41 new features for Google+, including a completely revamped Photo product, Hangouts app and the stream that people interact with on a daily basis.

There are currently 390M monthly active users over the web and 190M directly on the stream.

The stream changes will be familiar to Google+ users on iOS and Android, but have a few new wrinkles. The first noticeable item is the stream, which has been given the three-column treatment that the iPad version of the service presents so well. This is a huge departure from the Twitter and Facebook feed approach, which presents everything in one column. The multi-column design lets you scan items quicker, rather than scrolling endlessly for something to interact with.

I sat down with Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, and he walked me through some of the new features. He was quick to point out that Google’s new approach to “feeds” will bring more attention to content:

We’re fixing a longstanding problem with these feeds, they’re flat. Other sites let you scroll through posts that have been shared with you. You can’t go through and read on more topics. You can’t go deeper on an interest on topic.

Just in case you haven’t used Google+ at all, or want to see the quick contrast between the two designs, here’s what the stream looked like before today, complete with that awkward white space on the right:

The toolbar has been simplified, looking like the toolbar you see on search and every other property. The days of static left-hand navigation is gone, and good riddance. It only comes up when you need it by hovering over the “Home” button.

You’ll also notice that pieces of content in the stream stand out much more, and that’s because they’re interactive “Cards” a la Google Now. One of the new features of Google+ is that whenever you post a new piece of content, it will automatically get a hashtag. You can remove it if you like, but Google’s massive processing power goes to work to try and categorize all of the content being shared:

When you click the hashtag, the “card” will flip around to help you discover similar content. In the example of the Giants post, Gundotra showed me that Google automatically figured out that the post was about Buster Posey, since the company has deployed its photo-recognition technology on posted items. The image shared with the Giants post is of Buster Posey, naturally. By not taking you to a new stream of content when clicking around, Gundotra says that the context of what you’re interested in learning more about is preserved.

Another example of this automatic categorization is this picture of the Eiffel Tower. Gundotra explained that even though there was no text within the post that stated the origin of the photo, Google was able to figure out what it was, thus giving it the hashtag #EiffelTower. Greyed out hashtags are the ones automatically assigned by Google, and blue ones are the ones added by the sharer themselves:

For content like photos and videos, they will get the same treatment that they do on mobile, which is spread across multiple columns:

There are other interactive animations, like a bounce when you share someone’s post. Again, these are things that the Google+ mobile apps do well, and it’s meant to get you more engaged within the stream. I’m not sure if an animation will do that for me, but it’s fun the first few times that you see it.

From what I can gather, Google wants you spend more time consuming information and less time navigating a site. This new look, including Google’s favorite new font, Robot, fits in with the design of most of Google’s other products. This familiarity will encourage people to pay more attention to the content, but not necessarily share more.

Some of what Gundotra said about this new approach to a stream makes sense. When you use Facebook’s newly redesigned News Feed, you’re still shown a single column of items, allowing you to switch between content types. While that might work on a smartphone, it might not be the best use of real estate for the desktop. At least, that’s what Google is betting on with this overhaul.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, categorization, content, Facebook, Google, googleio2013, hashtags, io2013, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, stream, TC, Vic Gundotra

YouTube Tiptoes Toward Paywalls With The Launch Of Channel Subscriptions, But The Ads Play On

May 9, 2013 by Rip Empson Leave a Comment

While it would take you a million lifetimes to watch all the video on YouTube, the company relies on contributions from its amateur and professional partners to keep its content fresh. At the same time, its core business model revolves around providing advertisers with the ability to reach its billion-plus viewers. In turn, video creators rely (or want to rely) on a piece of that ad revenue to continue producing their content. The problem is, of course, that those ads are intrusive, annoying and, at the end of the day, its partners are finding that the revenue from those banners and clips isn’t growing nearly as fast as, say, the number of cat videos on YouTube.

In an effort to provide its partners with an alternative revenue stream, YouTube announced today that it is officially launching a pilot program that enables its video stars to charge subscription fees for access to their channels. Subscriptions will start at $0.99/month, and every channel will be able to offer a 14-day free trial, along with discounted yearly rates.

In its announcement, YouTube cites Sesame Street, which will offer full episodes through its paid channel, and UFC offering fans the ability to watch classic fights as examples. For more, here’s the list of its 53-odd pilot channels.

As of today, users can subscribe to paid channels from their desktops and laptops and watch across devices, but going forward YouTube will look to add the ability to subscribe from any medium/device. On top of that, YouTube will begin a broader roll out of subscriptions in the next few weeks for “qualifying partners,” and from the looks of it, it will be adding a paid channel recommendation feed — just as it does now for free channels.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel, why should you care? Well, YouTube has been telegraphing this for awhile, but it’s really the first (official) sign that YouTube is beginning to tiptoe into the paid video market. Granted, the subscription model isn’t a new idea for YouTube, considering the company just announced in March that it will be launching a music subscription service later this year.

The goal is much the same: Give musicians/artists/creators an opportunity to make some money, while improving the user experience for listeners by potentially removing some of those obnoxious ads that start every video. Of course, in the case of both video and music, it’s much more likely that YouTube is going to stick with both.

Amateur content creators are going to be hesitant about erecting paywalls around their content. Most viewers are going to balk at the idea of buying a subscription to a YouTube channel, and there’s a question of whether or not they’d really be able to convert enough of their viewers to paid subscriptions to make it worth it. In the end, it’s the same issue newspapers and publishers have struggled with for years.

There’s also the fact that every video producer is already offering their content for free, although behind ads. Now you’re going to tell viewers that they have to pay for the same content they’ve been getting for free? Sure, that will work for your superfans, but as is the way with the “freemium” model, if you’re going to charge, the content behind the paywall better be, well, premium. I want to see “Extras,” exclusive content/footage, and so on.

Of course, as Peter Kafka pointed out this week, amateur video producers likely don’t have the resources to produce that exclusive or premium content.

Nonetheless, the company is going to use paid subscriptions in an attempt to attract new partners, new content creator and, we assume, more dollars — although YouTube doesn’t specify whether it will be taking a cut of subscriptions or not. YouTube is clearly aware of the success Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo and other video sites have been having with subscription and on-demand models, and it wants to become more attractive to film and TV networks, studios and producers.

But for now, YouTube can’t make the jump exclusively to subscriptions, because it needs those ad dollars that are keeping the whole thing afloat. It’s a tricky line to walk, no doubt, but YouTube certainly isn’t helping its user experience by setting up the potential to have both a paywall and ads in and around videos for the foreseeable future.

Just speaking for myself personally, I probably most frequently use YouTube for search (and a little discovery), particularly around music. In other words, I’ll have a song or an artist in mind, will do a YouTube search, which inevitably serves a couple or dozens of choices for the same song, artist or even subject. There’s a high likelihood that I have no idea which video I want or is best, which requires some perusing, so having a 10 second ad at the beginning of each video is really disruptive.

Maybe that’s a niche use case, but I suspect not. YouTube ads, while tolerable because we consciously or subconsciously recognize their role in keeping millions of cat videos afloat and online, are frustrating. Sure, Hulu has ads, too, and they aren’t much better. But at least in Hulu’s case, the viewer knows they’re watching a 30-minute or hour-long episode of television online, and regular old offline TV has already conditioned us to expect ads every 5 seconds. Unfortunately. But for a 2-minute clip of questionable quality? Come on.

So keeping ads, while slowly throwing up paywalls is just a bad idea. So the roll out of paid video will end up being incremental and almost just a show of good faith — to keep from ruffling feathers — while the ads just keep proliferating.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, entertainment, Facebook, Google, media, paid video, paywall, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, startups, subscription, TC, video, YouTube

Klout Gets Into The Q&A Business By Launching Klout Experts (With Help From Bing)

May 8, 2013 by Anthony Ha Leave a Comment

So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program.

It sounds like the program won’t be rolled out to every user today, but when it is, you might Klout and be prompted to answer a question like “What is the best way to care for tulips?” or “What is the best place to take your date in the city?” You’ll have 300 characters with which to offer your answer. (Why 300? Co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez said 140 characters isn’t always enough, but he wanted to keep the answers direct and to the point.)

Fernandez told me that Klout is working closely with Bing on this feature, so if there are relevant answers on Klout, they’ll be featured prominently when people search for a given question on Bing. Fernandez said the search engine team is also suggesting future questions that Klout could ask its users. At the same time, while Klout doesn’t have the same cozy relationship with Google, the answers should show up there, too.

For now, Fernandez said he expects most of the Klout Experts traffic to come from Bing, but you can also browse the content on the Klout site itself. The company will be highlighting recent answers from your friends. Fernandez also suggest the on-site experience will improve over time. For one thing, he said users’ various answers to a single question are currently being sorted on a single page by human editors, but Klout is working on a voting system where people can endorse the answers they like — though you can only vote if you’re influential on that topic.

Fernandez suggested that this could eventually integrate with Perks and Klout for Business — for example, businesses could start asking their own questions and offer Perks for good answers.

When he described the new feature to me, I asked if people might think he was basically turning Klout’s user base into a content farm. Fernandez countered that these answers are going to be tied to people’s real identities, and emphasized that they won’t be able to post unless they’ve got a good score.

“What we’re good at is understanding the quality of engagement,” he said, adding that Klout scores are “a really good fitness function” for ensuring that people will create high-quality, useful content.

But why is Klout getting into this business at all? Well, Fernandez argued that Klout has become “the standard” in measuring online influence, so now it can start building other applications and uses on top of that system. Klout Experts is the first example of that.

“Influence and reputation is our platform,” he said.

Nonetheless, he also acknowledged that creating the feature has been a bit of a shift, pushing Klout to hire people who have more experience on the editorial side and with user-generated content: “How do we get people from Yelp versus Google Analytics?”

The Experts program is currently focused on technology, food, music and travel. You can view some sample answers here and here and sign up for early access here.

Filed Under: Bing, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, klout, Klout Experts, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, startups, TC

Google+ Hangouts On Air Now Process Videos During Recording, Allowing For Live Rewind And Immediate Publishing

May 7, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Google+ Hangouts allow for groups of friends or colleagues have an intimate face-to-face conversation, but the “On Air” feature of the service allows you to broadcast to the masses. The President Of The United States Of America has taken part in these conversations, but anyone can set up their own. Today, the Hangouts team has introduced some new functionality that make participating in a live On Air a little bit easier.

Up until now you haven’t been able to do anything other than watch the live broadcast as it happens, which is nice until you have to run to the kitchen to grab a drink or pause to take a phone call. Today, viewers can now rewind your broadcast no matter where they are during the live filming process.

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

The only negatives that I see to this is that it slows down the ramp up time it takes to start your broadcast, so you should buffer some time in to get started before your actual scheduled “live” time:

Other tweaks in this push include higher quality versions of a Hangout On Air via your mobile device, which is nice since these can be kind of grainy, depending on your connection at the time. Additionally, live broadcasts will now start without having to refresh a page, which was a real pain in the ass. Now if you visit a page that has the embedded On Air player, it will just automagically start playing.

The Hangouts product has made its way into many of Google’s services, including its mobile offerings on Android and even Glass. The usecase for Hangouts widely vary, but Google has been dogfooding it way before its release. The “On Air” option has the attention of both local and national broadcasters, giving them away to connect to audiences in a way more intimate way.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, hangouts, Hangouts On Air, media, rewind, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, TC, video

Google+ Hangouts On Air Now Process Videos During Recording, Allowing For Live Rewind And Immediate Publishing

May 7, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, hangouts, Hangouts On Air, media, rewind, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, TC, video

Google+ Hangouts On Air Now Process Videos During Recording, Allowing For Live Rewind And Immediate Publishing

May 7, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, Facebook, Google, hangouts, Hangouts On Air, media, rewind, search engine optimization, SEO, social, Social Networking, TC, video

Google+ Hangouts On Air Now Process Videos During Recording, Allowing For Live Rewind And Immediate Publishing

May 7, 2013 by Drew Olanoff Leave a Comment

Additionally, On Air videos will immediately be published instead of carrying the normal waiting period where you’ll get the infamous “processing…” dialogue.

[Photo credit: Flickr]