Tag Archives: plus

December 15, 2011, 11:00 am

Collaborate with Colleagues Using Google+ with Extras

This past summer I wrote about staying connected with family using video chat software. This past year, however, I’ve been using video chats for another purpose: to collaborate with colleagues around the country on several inter-institutional projects. Though I rarely use it as a social network, I’ve actually found that the hangout features in Google+ are perfect for professional collaboration. The service is free, the video quality is good, and you can bring in up to ten video streams simultaneously; in Skype, by contrast, you have to pay for a premium account to have more than two simultaneous video streams in one chat. What’s more, in September Google added a number of features to Google+ hangouts that make them particularly compelling for academic collaboration.

The most powerful of these new features—for me at least—is the new Google Docs integration (for lots more on the…

July 11, 2011, 8:00 am

Introducing Google+

By Brian Croxall

Almost two weeks ago, Google caught most everyone off guard by suddenly introducing a new social network, Google+. Google+ isn’t the search giant’s first foray into social networking. There was last year’s Buzz, which really put a bee in everyone’s bonnet with a privacy snafu on its first day. There’s Orkut, which is relatively unknown in North America and Europe, but is among the top-visited websites in Brazil and India. And there’s Google Friend Connect…which I hadn’t even heard of until I started writing this post.

With no major problems in its first 13 days—except for the difficulty of securing an invite to the service during its “field trial”—Google+ appears to be the company’s best entry into social networking thus far. If you’ve used any social network—but especially Facebook—the basics of Google+ will seem very familiar. You add people that you know to your circles…