Article by George Norman

On 21 Sep 2011

Until now, if you wanted to try out Google’s big push into social networking, mainly the Google Plus social network, you had to get an invite from someone who was already on Google Plus. Millions of people managed to get past this barrier and tried out Google Plus – more than 30 million within the first three weeks, according to figures released by ComScore.

The “get an invite” barrier is a thing of the past now. The Mountain View-based search engine giant announced this week that Google Plus moved out of the testing phase, that it is now available to the general public as a Beta. Anyone interested in trying out Google Plus can do so without the need for an invite.


“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 visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about,” announced Senior Vice President of Engineering with Google, Vic Gundotra.

Anyone with a public Google account can try out the social network and enjoy the functionality it has to offer. If you don’t have a public Google account, the first time you visit google.com/+ you will be prompted to create one.

If you are not familiar with Google Plus, here are main bits of functionality it has to offer:

Circles – you can create circles of friends and share different bits and pieces with different circles. You could for example have a circle with all your work friends, another with your non-work friends, and another circle with your family members. After you create a circle, you just drag and drop a contact into a circle – it is as simple as that.
Sparks – similar to Google Reader, it helps you find interesting content online. It is a feed that will deliver content to you based on your interests.
Hangouts – these are virtual rooms where you can video chat with contacts in your circles.
Huddles – this is group messaging for people within your Circles. You can thus communicate with multiple people at the same time.
Instant Upload – the photos you take with your phone are automatically uploaded to the web. Instead of you having to deal with the cumbersome process of uploading photos, the photos are “auto-magically” uploaded.

To get started with Google Plus, just click here.



Tags: Google, Google Plus, Google+

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