The test phase that began in just three months ago has finally come to an end. Google+ has officially been made available for all, and with its release, there are also a number of new features that Google has integrated with its other services.
Users have been able to sign up on Google+ for a little more than a week now. Until then, it was only possible to sign up if the user received an invitation. All users need is a Google account to sign up, and immediately, users can exchange with one another. Even though Google+ is still taking baby steps, it’s still doing an excellent job bringing “the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software”, as described by Vic Gundotra from the Engineering Team. The internet giant is not only continuously adding new features but also expanding the social network. We have the most important features summed up:

-The “Hangouts”, which allow up to ten users to commence in a video-conference, is now available for the latest apps for Android and the iPhone, as well as other smartphones.

-In addition, Google+ is adding “Hangouts On Air”: live updates that can be viewed by anyone, if desired, in order to reach the largest group possible.

-With Hangout, participants in a video-conference can also make their own desktop visible to other participants. That way, photos and videos can easily be shared, or software easily explained. And not only that: Google links its network with other services. So during a Hangout, users can, for example, work on a document together using “Google Text and Tabels”.

-Google+ users also have immediate access to the +Search: users can enter a question in the search field and receive relevant entries from people and popular results from the web.

The number of social media users, regularly recorded by the market research company GfK with its Media Efficiency Panel, could change significantly after these changes on Google’s social network. According to Kress-Mediendienst, only about 1.5 percent of Germans online use Google+, whereas Facebook has about 50 percent. However, Google was not yet open for the public as this was published. According to a post from Paul Allen, who founded the portal Ancestry.com and considers himself to be a Google+ statistician, Google’s number of users has skyrocketed since it went public: the user number grew to a whopping 43 million in just two days. This is a gain of approximately 30 percent, and after five days, there were already 50 million users. The number of users on Facebook is about 800 million. We will definitely be following the social media market quite closely.