For my last blog posting of 2013 I decided on something unusual. Because it was really the year of Google+ for me, I shared out a few of my circles over there in the last few days. This was not an easy decision, because although Google+ is all about circles, I have to admit that I’m not a big circle sharer. This is mainly because my own collection of circles is rather chaotic, but I chose five of my most important circles to share at the end of this year to highlight and thank all the amazing people I’ve met there. I actually shared the circles yesterday directly on Google+ and this is just a blog article collecting those posts together, but this will be the start of a regular feature. But before we come to the circles…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Photography Essentials – This one is my “small” Photography circle of people I mainly found in the beginning about one year ago. These are people whose posts I don’t want to miss even when I don’t have time to look at all the other circles. Don’t be angry if you’re not in there – there are two more much bigger photo circles coming up after this!
Photography One – This is the first part of my “big” hand-picked Photographer circles. Everybody from the Essentials circle is also in here, plus everyone I noticed in other circles, who plussed or commented on my posts or who I learned to know through other people. If you’re not in there, either I haven’t noticed you yet or you don’t fulfil my one requirement: you have to post your own work. There are only original photography content creators in here
Photography Two – The second part of my “big” Photographer circle. I had to split it to be able to share it because of the 500 user limit. This second circle is the one I constantly add new people to and maybe I’ll post an updated version once in a while!
Science, Space & Astronomy – One of the other things I try to get involved in, or at least promote, is everything about these three fields and for this reason I have a hand-picked circle with everything about science, spaceflight and exploration and astronomy around. It’s a relatively low-noise group, but everyone from space journalists and scientists from the CosmoQuest / Universe Today crowd, many astronauts and a lot more people are in there. If you want even more, have a look at Fraser Cain’s Super Science Circle, on which my circle is, of course, partly based on.
Astrophotographers – There is some overlap with the Science circle, but I chose use a separate circle for astrophotography to see all the beautiful images in one place. Credit where credit is due, though: this circle is also based, but not completely similar, to one with the same name originally shared by Fraser Cain.
This is just the beginning, let’s see what 2014 will bring…! :-)
Yesterday there were some pretty big announcements from Google about their own social network Google+ at the event they dubbed A Morning with Google+. Apparently the whole thing ran a bit late because of a power outage, causing a bit of sniggering from some people, but in the end Vic Gundotra was able to present the new updates to the Google+ system mainly revolving around photography. I must admit that I didn’t pay much attention to it since I don’t even use many of the tools, but when I watched the video later I was alternately fascinated and bored – and also felt a bit patronized.
The new features mainly revolve around things Google+ wants to make easier for the user – new video-editing possibilities with automatic enhancements and soundtrack creation, new auto-awesome animations for photos, an algorithm which automatically selects the “best” of your photos for you and much more. But this is really only for the ultra-casual user – Gundotra talks about how we take soooo many photos and we all have no time to sort through everything ourselves or do some necessary enhancements, so now Google+ will now do it for you. To be fair, the new online tools are only introduced as the first quick fix, because he also mentions the quite good Android photo editor Snapseed and for professionals the Nik Collection of filter tools, but the somewhat peculiar aftertaste is that Google wants to outsource creativity to the machine. I can understand Google’s motives and while I think the new features are impressive, they are not really for, let’s say, advanced amateur photographers like me.
But this is not what I actually wanted to write about in this posting. Another Google product manager, Otavio Silva, posted a much more important update: Google is rolling out real, name-based URLs for everyone right now. Up to now, only really important people were able to get a human-readable URL on Google+, everyone else just had a long number. Now you can finally get an address like plus.google.com/+YourName – maybe this will be the last straw that kept many people from using Google+. The only problem is that at the moment this doesn’t happen automatically, instead you have to wait for some sort of notification via email or a message in your profile – I’m still waiting, while some of my G+ acquaintances already got their “vanity adresses”. But maybe I’m just a little impatient, after all I think I don’t need to worry that someone else snaps my name away since I’m pretty unique all over the internet!
[Update 31.10.: Sometime last night the email arrived and there was also a big blue announcement banner in my profile settings. I’m not a number anymore, now I’m google.com/+GuidoBibra -the old adress still works, but this is much more convenient!]
Bottom line: Google+ is still lightyears ahead of everyone else when it comes to inventiveness and engineering, although not all new features may be useful for everyone.
The post title says it all: it seems that Google is rethinking its stance against remote posting to Google+. A recent article on the main WordPress blog called Your Blog, Plus One: Connect and Share on Google+ announces that you can now share directly to Google+, link your blog to your G+ account, integrate comments and even embed G+ articles into WordPress posts. It’s the first one I’m very excited about, but at the moment all this still applies only to blog hosted on WordPress.com – however they promise that most of the features will also come to the Publicize module of the Jetpack plugin for self-hosted blogs. I just hope that most doesn’t mean that the sharing functionality will be left out!
The whole point of this is that I’ve become very fond of Google+ since I joined at the end of last year. At the beginning I was very reluctant to post because I couldn’t do it directly from WordPress, but over time I’ve found out that it works very well for me especially on the Photography Blog. The interaction between the users is what I like most – it’s not just about getting +1’s, the G+ equivalent of Likes, but really meeting other people, talking about what we like and what matters to us, and, of course, lots and lots of inspiration. Posting remotely from WordPress like I do on Facebook and Twitter will not change any of that – except that I may be able to plan better ahead when I’m actually able to post automatically. This is what Google doesn’t want to allow – but I don’t see anything wrong with e.g. letting the blog post an article and then later come back and see if there are any comments to answer. I’m certainly not going to abuse that, but it would make everything much easier.
I actually have one rule for myself: I will not post exclusively to Google+ or any other social network – everything that appears there will also be on one of my websites, with small exceptions like the occasional quick reshare and, of course, commenting. I may actually embed Google+ comments on my blogs in the future, because most people tend to comment on my postings over on G+ and hardly on the blogs itself – which I fully understand, because I’m also guilty of it myself. I would just like to link the WordPress postings to the comments on the corresponding Google+ article. But, in the light of what happened to CosmoQuest recently, I may decide against a direct comment integration – maybe just a backlink to the G+ article would be better if it can be done automatically.
But first let’s see what happens when the next Jetpack update comes – fingers crossed that this will really include posting from WordPress!
[Update 22.09.: There was a fairly large Jetpack update a couple of days ago with lots of Google+ connection stuff in there, but the Publicize module has not changed yet, so it’s still not possible to post from a self-hosted WordPress site to G+. They promised, however, that this is going to be implemented soon… but when is unclear.]
So on Wednesday, Google made some changes on Google+. Okay, make that a LOT of changes… during the IO Conference a whole lot of updates were announced and to the amazement of many users, were rolled out almost immediately. But while the changes of the user interface of Google+ are drastic to say the least, the new layout is not altogether new – it’s basically the look of the mobile app adapted to the desktop. The multi-column layout is taking a little getting used to, but it actually works quite well. The reactions from the users range from excited to horrified, but the majority seems to like it – and I have to say, that apart from some small issues, I’m also in favour of the new design.
I loved the old user interface of Google+, but after using the Android app about half the time I was wondering how long the actually rather old-fashioned UI would last. A redesign was inevitable, and I think Google was quite successful with it – for a start, it does look like a completely original creation and now has left Facebook firmly behind. I was a bit concerned regarding the rendering speed since we don’t have very fast computers around here, but apart from the expected slight slowdown in Opera, Google+ now even works faster especially in Google Chrome. The user interface now doesn’t feel like a website anymore, but like a real program, especially when you run it in fullscreen. The new layout wastes a bit more screen real estate, but even on my small 1024×768 notebook screen it’s more than acceptable. Apart from the layout changes, Google has also changed the default font to Roboto, which is really easy on the eyes and now consistent with the Android system.
But there are still some problems to be ironed out. Some photographers have complained about the new photo album system and there have been reports that the photo upload is sometimes extremely slow. I’m not a heavy user of the photo albums since I only throw my images in the photos from posts bucket and use the gallery software on my own website, but some users have real issues with the new system, which disrupted their workflow so heavily that they refuse to post any more photos. There is also one grievance that has hit me: when I want to upload a photo – which works now with drag and drop – the posting box becomes so big that I have to scroll down to use the post-button. This only happens on my 1024×768 notebook screen, but it’s still a little bit of nuisance which could be easily fixed with some smaller margins in the post box. It may be possible to fix this with a modified CSS code, but I have not yet looked into a solution for this.
Overall, the new layout is an amazing evolution of Google+ and while the surprisingly fast changeover could have gone better and there are still some teething problems, there is no reason to believe that Google is going to ignore the users. More control over the look of the user interface would be good and there have been some rumours that this is exactly what Google is working on at the moment. The new incarnation of Google+ will surely be even more improved and there is no need to panic or to do a rage quit. After all, Google is offering us a completely free service and while this does not mean that the users are not allowed to complain, there have been a few (understandable) overreactions in the last few days.
Google+ Icon comes from Dryicons.com – much better than the official ones :-).
Yes, Christmas is barely over and now it’s Easter again – not that we would notice any difference with the cold weather and the occasional snow. Anyway, I hope everyone’s having a nice Easter holiday weekend! I’m taking it easy this year and while I don’t have anything new apart from this posting here on this blog, there’s something on my other websites…
On DVDLog I’ve just posted an English translation of my old article about Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of my favourite movies and DVDs. Recently I had decided to switch the website completely over to English and that gives me always something to do when I haven’t got anything new to write about – there are going to be many more translations of my favourite reviews and hopefully some new discs will arrive to provide for some current articles.
The Photography Blog is even more active – I’ve been posting at least one image a day continuously since last summer and I don’t plan to stop! I’m also working on some remastered versions of older galleries and this spring I also hope to completely redesign the whole site. But that’s still a long way off and a bit difficult, since I not only need to redesign the WordPress blog, but also the Coppermine gallery. Meanwhile, I’m of course continuing with the daily photo posts.
And this Blog is going to continue with a curious mix of computer stuff, webdesign, science & astronomy and other things, but I think I’m also going to gradually switch to English here. I have become very active over at Google+ and continuing to write in German would not be very productive, because most of the people in my circles don’t understand much German. But I promise that everything I’m posting to Google+ or Facebook will also appear on my websites first. Next in the pipeline will be a reworked and maybe also translated version of my two Android tablet articles.
And that’s it for this year’s Easter update! Check back soon for more stuff, or circle me on Google+, friend me on Facebook, use the RSS feed, etcetera :-).
After the depressing news about the demise of Google Reader, here are some good news from Google. Yesterday, an update for the Google+ Android app had been released and after several previous updates just with some minor improvements and fixes, the new version 3.6 came with some amazing surprises. For starters, the posting stream in both the circles and the communities has been slightly revamped without losing the “magazine”-look. Completely new plus-, share- and comment-buttons in style of the web interface have been added and even thumbnails of the commenters are displayed in the stream overview. The dynamic reformatting of the posts also seems to work much better now, although the right and left margins have become a little larger. But most importantly, the app now scrolls vertically in landscape mode instead of horizontally like before.
There are also two special changes in the streams which photographers on Google+ will love: 1) images are no longer randomly cropped into a square format and 2) tapping on an image directly leads to the gallery view while tapping on the post header calls up the single post view. The single post view has also been very much improved, now showing the header, the image in full width, the comments and a fixed one-line comment box on the bottom. The user profile view now shows the complete larger header image, but the user photo is still square, although it is displayed as a circle in the stream. The circle view now also boasts a very handy new addition: a header with nine thumbnails of people and a tenth box with the number of users in the circle. Underneath is a settings button, which calls up a long-missing feature from the web interface: in the Android app it is now possible to adjust how many postings of the circle are seen in the main stream. This is also present in the community, it can be found when the header is expanded.
There might be even more new features I have not yet discovered, I’ve heard that there are also new functions for moderating a community. I also don’t know which of these changes are present in the iOS version, since I’ve only used the Android app. All in all, it’s a brilliant update which makes many of the features from the web interface finally available on smartphones and tablets – and it shows how far developed Google+ on mobile devices really is in comparison to Facebook. The Android app also really works well on low-powered devices like my little Odys Xelio tablet – version 3.6 runs much smoother now and for some reason I was able to update it directly from the Play Store for the first time.
But Google has also been a little lambasted recently for the introduction of Google Keep, a little Android notepad app, which directly syncs with a special new section in Google Drive and can also be used from the web interface. It just does what it says on the cover: keep notes, but you can also enter lists, take photos and insert pictures. The layout is like a post-it collection, and while the functionality is totally basic, not much more is really needed to make it a very handy little program which is ideal for taking short notes or even transferring small texts or web adresses from a computer to a tablet. Of course there are other apps like Evernote, Note Everything or Handrite, but Google Keep beats them all for sheer simplicity.
