Hello folks and welcome to a long overdue Googling Friday. We have a lot to catch up on in the world of Google as well as a review of their new social network Google+. So let’s get right into things!
Google made $9 billion in Q2
Google has announced that it had revenues of $9.02 billion in Q2 as well as $2.51 billion in net income. That is a 32% increase over the same quarter last year. Google’s various sites made up 69% of the revenues.
Netflix Expands to 24 Android devices
Netflix has updated its app to now support 24 different Android models, also of note it works on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Motorola Xoom tablet devices as well.
Google Says Goodbye to Google Labs
Google has announced it is winding down its Google Labs service. This was a cool place to visit to try out new things Google was cooking up. I enjoyed it as a geek but look forward to seeing how they might deply future projects for early test dummies…err…I mean adopters.
New Gmail and Calendar look, enhancements to Google Voice
Google has taken the look of Google+ and added it to the look of Gmail and Calendar if you so desire to use that theme. Also a new feature to Google Voice is the ability to make simultaneous calls.
Google+ Review
So I have been using Google’s new social network, Google+ for about 3 weeks now and I must say that despite it being in beta status, it is quite impressive already. Right now the only way to join Google+ is by invite but as of now Google+ already has 20 million users which is nothing to sneeze at. My favorite feature by far is Circles, basically Circles is something you create and then add your friends to. It can be anything you want from something as basic as a Friends circle to topic based ones like Football, Politics, Tech, etc. The advantage here is you can post a message to only specific circles that might be of interest to your topic or you can post a Public post which anyone can see and I do mean anyone. If you just want to post to people you have in your circles you can post to Your Circles.
Another feature is Hangout, Hangout is a video chat with up to 9 other people, you can also watch YouTube videos together in Hangout. If you use Picasa for your photos you will be happy to know that it is integrated right into Google+, but if you are like me and a lot of your photos are on Facebook, there is a way to port them over to Google+. Course any social network site has to have a mobile app these days and Google+ is no exception supporting both an Android and an iPhone version (unfortunatley there is no tablet version at this time.), both are free and support the same features. The Mobile version also allows for mobile photo uploading and checking in like Four Square and Facebook Places. Unique to the mobile versions is a feature called Huddle which allows you to do group IM to any particular user(s) or circles.
So, is this a replacment for Facebook? At this point, no, certainly Facebook has huge user base of 550 million users at last count, but there are some compelling reasons to use Google+ over Facebook. Eric Schmidt has also stated he would love to have more integration with Facebook and Twitter and if you are a Google Chrome user, there is an extension called Start Google+ that will allow you to cross post and read you Facebook and Twitter feeds from within Google+.
So my recommendation is yes I would totally get a Google+ account and if you are not a member yet, I have the ability to send out invites, just send me your email address if you want one. It is a great service and Circles is just awesome when you don’t want to share to the entire world. If you want to add some cool Google+ icons to your blog or website here is a great source for them.
Well, that is going to do it for this edition of Googling Friday. See you all next week for more news from Google. Have a great weekend!
