Google, the world’s largest search company, is competing, apparently, with Facebook to become a major force in social networking. Google+announced today and it looks promising.
Not to mention, Google+ designed by one of the creators of the original Macintosh. Wired’s Steven Levy is reporting that Andy Hertzfeld, actually, played an essential role in the design of Google+.
With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic, and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app. That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Hertzfeld.
Google+ design really is excellent, especially for Google. It is invite-only at the moment.
Update:
Google has released many videos explaining the new project:
Google announced a bunch of new features at Inside Search press conference, June 14th, 2011, which took place yesterday. The new additions are voice search on desktop computers, Instant Search and Image Search.
Voice Search on the desktop
Google Voice Search has been available in phones for years. Both Android handset and iPhone via Google’s search app have that feature for a long time, and now the same capability is brought to the desktop and initially, to the Chrome.
Search by Image
With this feature you can now upload images straight to the search engine and Google will search through the image file and attempt to locate any similar images and return you the terms they’re associated with:
If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks
Google has released an extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users identify any picture on the web by simply right-clicking.
Instant Pages
Google is bringing Instant Pages to Google Chrome. Available in all of the beta and dev versions of Google Chrome, Instant Pages is Google’s answer to the pre-fetching features built in to Mozilla’s Firefox. Instead of simply scraping basic HTML information ahead of time, however, Google says that their pre-rendering will grab other resources as well such as Javascript for snappy page loading. Instant Pages are only being used for search results (not targeted for ads specifically), but Google did mention they’ll be looking at how to best deliver ads to consumers in the future. Instant Pages allow the most common results to load instantly (in virtually zero seconds) when the user decides to load them:
Google pointed out that mobile searches on its site have grown and now surpassed desktop searches.
Twitter has just announced an updated mobile version for their web app, a redesigned experience on iPhone with seamless interaction allows to quickly scroll through your timeline, move between tabs and compose Tweets. The new app will show up selectively for some lucky users.
We want you to be able to access Twitter no matter where you are; regardless of what device you use; or, whether you prefer to access Twitter through a mobile application or the browser. Today, we’re starting to roll out a new version of twitter.com for mobile devices. This web app allows us to provide a high-quality and consistent Twitter experience on high-end touchscreen devices – whether or not an official Twitter application is available. It was built from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest web technologies, including HTML5.
The app is fast – you can quickly scroll through your timeline, move between tabs and compose Tweets. It’s rich – it takes advantage of capabilities that high-end device browsers offer, such as touch gestures and a large screen. And it’s simple – it’s easy-to-use and has the features you’d expect from a Twitter application, including your timeline, @mentions, messages that you can read in conversation view, search, trending topics, lists, and more.
We are releasing this application today to a small percentage of users on iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android smartphones, and we’ll be rolling it out to additional folks with those devices in the coming weeks. You can use Twitter on your phone’s browser by going to twitter.com. If you don’t yet have access to the new web app, you’ll still be able to use the existing version of twitter.com for mobile browsers.
With an official post on the company’s blog, Google announced a major new version of Google Mobile app for iPhone with a completely new look, new features and a new name: Google Search for iPhone. The app packs all the functionalities from the previous version in a new UI, easily accessible for everyone and built on top of iOS 4′s multitasking and fast app switching capabilities.
Second, we’ve made it easier to pick up searching where you left off. If you leave the app and come back later, you’ll be able either to start a new search right away (just tap in the search box to type, hit the microphone button to do a voice search or tap on the camera icon to use Google Goggles) or get back to exactly where you were by tapping on the lower part of the page.
Finally, there are a number of improvements we’ve made to everything else you love in the app, including Google Goggles, Voice Search, Search with My Location, Gmail unread counts and more.
