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Google+ Updates App For iOS And Android, Allows Web Users To Have GIFs Instead Of Profile Pictures

Google+ has launched new versions of its iOS and Android apps, with improvements to photos, posts, profiles and communities. Meanwhile, both the desktop and the mobile versions of the site now allow users to have an animated GIF in place of their profile picture.

The most interesting new feature added to the Google+ app is photo filtering. There are nine different filters to choose from, based on photo editing software created by Snapseed, an app Google purchased last year. Users are now able to rotate and crop their photos, as well as adjust saturation, contrast, brightness and lots more. A tweaked photo can be compared with the original at any time with a single tap on the screen.

Posts on the mobile apps have been streamlined to include more content and to make navigation easier. There is “more text up front” included in posts and “image previews are rarely cropped”, according to Google+’s announcement of the update. tapping links to videos, photos or websites will take you instantly to a viewing page, a lightbox and the site, respectively. Also “key actions like +1, reshare and comment are displayed more prominently in each post” and users “can swipe through photo albums inline”.

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Google+ users can now share their current location, which will appear underneath their name on their profile page. Users choose who gets to see this information, deciding whether to make it public or private, for only their close friends or those within certain circles to see. To try the feature out, users can go to their Google+ settings and switch on “Location Sharing”. Or, according to Google+:
You can also visit +Chris Hadfield’s profile—the Canadian Space Agency astronaut is sharing his current location (the International Space Station!) with all of us here on Earth
Finally, mobile app users now have access to some of the communities management tools which have been introduced to desktop users over the last few weeks. There are three new abilities for both community moderators and members:

  • The ability to adjust the volume of community posts in your Home stream
  • The option to invite people to a community, or reshare items with a community
  • Member search, content moderation, and report-remove-ban support for community managers.
The updates are available on the Google Play and the iTunes App Store.

Google+ has also updated their profile picture options, so users can now have an animated GIF instead of a profile picture. The GIF will only be animated on the profile page and not in the stream, solving the problem that Twitter had when they introduced a similar feature to their site: A whole stream of tweets with dozens of animated GIFs proved to be very annoying. Here is an example of the new profile GIF option, on the profile of Google software engineer Matt Steiner.

Do you think profile GIFs are a good idea?

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Will Sigsworth

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Google+ Updates App For iOS And Android, Allows Web Users To Have GIFs Instead Of Profile Pictures Reviewed by Unknown on Tuesday, March 26, 2013 Rating: 5
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