After being in a closed invite only 90 day beta period, Google’s new social network Google+ has now opened it doors to all, but still retains its beta tag. In a Tuesday post on the Official Google Blog, Google announced that it is launching nine new features, including open signups.
“For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups. This way anyone can visitgoogle.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about,”
Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra wrote for the blog post.
Google + brings a number of new features to the social networking arena, one of which called “hangouts” that allows you to create areas to chat with others via video face-to-face and has already been used for cooking classes and music concerts during the beta trials.
Here’s what they added today:
- Hangouts on your phone
- Hangouts On Air
- Hangouts with extras
- Hangouts APIs
- Search in Google+
- Signups open for Everyone
A new application has also been rolled out today enabling you to create Hangouts from your Android smartphones running Android 2.3+ with front-facing cameras with iOS support for the new feature within a Google application expected to arrive very shortly.
Another great features in Google+ is its “Circles” which allows you to group your contacts making it easier to manage and send information to only those you wish to see it. Now that Google+ has been released to the masses it will be interesting to see how if now competes with the likes of Facebook and Twitter as it grows in size.
