It took Google some time to open their social network service Google Plus to the public. Up until now it was only possible to join the service after receiving an invite, or by accessing the site when Google removed the invite-limitation temporarily.
Google today over at the official Google Blog announced that Google+ is now available for everyone which means that anyone can sign up for Google+ without invitation. This step marks the transition from field trial of beta.
Users who want to sign up can head over to the official website at google.com/+ or http://plus.google.com/ to sign up for the service.
Google notes on the sign up page that Google+ is in Beta, which means that users may run into technical issues and other problems on the site during that time.
The very same blog post announced a slew of new and improved features. This includes hangouts on the phone. Users who connect to Google Plus via their phone can now join Hangouts just like desktop users can.
Hangouts are currently only supported on Android 2.3 and higher devices with front facing cameras. Google notes that iOS support will come soon.
Hangouts on Air is another new feature which allows Google Plus users to record a session. This session can then be watched by anyone. Hangouts got additional extras, including screensharing, a sketchpad, Google Docs support and an option to create named hangouts. Google last week launched the Google+ Api that allows developers to create services and features around the social networking site. Today, Google is releasing an api specifically for Hangouts. Developers find more information about the available Apis over at the Google+ Platform blog.
More interesting to the majority of Google+ users is the improved Search in Google+. The search is now finding relevant people and posts, and “popular content from the web”.
You can read the full announcement over at the official Google Blog. And while you are at it, why do not you add me to your circles?
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Whatever, Vivian Alive is deadly dead on G+, they won’t allow “anonymity”, I will damp Google without consideration but will never give us my Internet ID.
Everyone who isn’t a Google Apps user. Total fail by Google on this part. Really annoyed by them.
No communities, no anonymity, no personal messages, no privacy. I don’t know why i got into G+ during early beta. There is nothing interesting for me. Going back to twitter and facebook. I think google just wants to kill other social networks and launching their competition for the sake of ad money. They launched jaiku to kill twitter, google+ to kill facebook. I only see monopoly stuff going on here.
I’m glad Google+ came in Indonesia. Previously Google+ has not accessible from Indonesia. Thank you for the information.
If I were to socialize on a network it definitely would be on Google+, but that would require that all social networks stop tracking those who are not logged/registered (I mean, FB, G+, Twitter and affiliated scripts not only slowing down overall but moreover tracking non-affiliated users is a sum of irritation to put it mildly), and a personal concern for blabla which is not mine at this time.
After reading some posts and articles on G+, I decided not to enter it unless it will be forced on me by some party I work for or maintain close relations with.
I was really upset by that news about ‘Real name policy’ and its enforcement. More to it, after reading Cory Doctorow article, where he cited Google’s executive saying that G+ is not social network, but identity network… I don’t need more identity networks than I have.