Google has announced changes to modify its social platform, Google+, with the goal of improving the user experience. The platform seems to be increasing its focus on high quality imagery with the addition of RAISR technology and photo zoom option. We expect to see Google rolling out more updates and changes to Google+ as it works to increase its usefulness as a social media platform.
New Features
In hopes of keeping conversations flowing, Google will start automatically start hiding low quality comments. You can still see all of the comments by clicking on the info icon on the top of a post and selecting “see all comments.” You will then be able to see all comments, hidden and unhidden together in the comment section. This is a nice feature that will help weed out spammy behavior that can be prevalent on social networks.
Google will be decreasing image sizes, but images will hold their high quality attributes. They are able to do this using RAISR technology that allows high quality photos but with lower bandwidth required to load. RAISR stands for Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution. The idea is that they can decrease the bandwidth used to load an image while also increasing the quality – thereby giving the images a faster load time, allowing users to consume less data on their mobile device, while still delivering beautiful photos.
In addition to RAISR, Google has introduced a zoom feature on photos (web version only right now). Once you click on a photo to make it full screen, navigate to the top right to find the zoom icon. The zoom function will appear giving you a slider option to increase or decrease the zoom level, along with a preview box of the full image so you can easily select which area you want to zoom on and view full screen. Stop moving your mouse around and the preview box will disappear allowing you to see the full section that you have chosen to zoom in on.
Re-Invented Features
Google is bringing back its Events feature. This makes sense, as event type features have become quite useful on other social platforms, like Facebook. Google Events will allow users to create and join events. We expect to see seamless integration with the Google Calendar here, along with updates and improvements to the feature if users begin to adapt it.
New Design Layout
Google has announced that it will be eliminating a significant amount of white space on the Google+ platform. The goal here is to attract you to the images and making images the focal point of the platform. This will allow you to see more posts on the screen and hopefully encourage more site activity.
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