Gadgetory

today at Google i/o the company is announcing 41 separate features that are coming to the social network that's a lot so we headed down to the company's mount a new campus to talk to people behind Google Plus let's see what's up it seems like the last year has been there's been a lot of stuff connecting up to Google+ I know I at the last I owe you described goplus as the spine Google connecting everything together the first is our social spine once you've logged in and upgraded to google plus we want to present you with one seamless experience not a series of disconnected products it seems like you largely achieve that like everything feels pretty integrated there's still a little bit of work to be done so what's this next year going to be about well you're right the last year we spent a lot of our energy really making sure that Google feels like a beautiful unified experience so that your identity is your identity then you don't have to keep telling Google when you go to youtube or when you go to Gmail or whether you use something on Android who you are I think we're you know if I the handicap but I'd say we're about sixty percent of the way done all right you still have a lot more to do to really make things seamless for users most of the features that are getting introduced for Google+ fall into three important buckets the first is a redesign of Google+ is main website the company has essentially taken their interface for tablets and applied it to the web instead of a vertical stream of posts you get a three-column layout of cards each one can be flipped over to reveal more content and Google believes that you're going to want to drill down to get more information within each card one thing we know at Google is that latency matters and so we ensure that everything is served up as quickly as possible there's no gratuitous animations they're there when you need them and they recede when you don't it could be a little confusing but we'll see how it's like an actual practice Google is also automatically adding hashtags to every post if you want them the company is using its computers to automatically figure out what it is you're posting it's a photo of the Eiffel Tower or a story about a baseball game and add those hashtags in the next big feature is hangouts it's a merger of google talk google+ messenger and the old video hangouts and it's a big deal Google's been behind the curve on mobile messaging and it's nice to see them finally catching up but an iMessage killer this is not next up our photo enhancements literally Google will automatically enhance every photo that you upload to plus it runs them through a gamut of smart filters like light balance color balance it fixes skin blemishes and much more if you don't like the changes your original photos are still there untouched some of the enhancements were a little bit overbearing in our original demo but most of the photos were better another feature with photos is called highlights Google looks through every album that you upload the + and automatically presents you with the best photos as determined by computers that learn from real humans it can identify blurry shots duplicate shots and even the faces of your friends and family from your google+ circles it actually does a decent job of recognizing what makes a good or bad photo so we know what you like we know what is regionally appropriate for your photos because if you look at a photo of a wedding in Thailand in the photo of a wedding the United States they're very very different the way to compose and shots and kind of the colors that they like to use and so we are able to take advantage of the stuff over time and improve these algorithms Google+ may not have your friends like Facebook does but the company does have a massive and massively powerful cloud computing platform the idea is basically to hook your social network up to a data center and see what interesting things pop out of it Google's betting that they get your photos they can get your friends