On the Same Day Facebook ‘Actions’ Launches, Google+ Introduces More New Features

While the internet is abuzz with news of Facebook’s new ‘actions’ that rolled out today, Google+ have also launched some new features to their social networking offering. Google+ have been actively enhancing their product since the new year, with the launch of their social search feature and the subsequent spat with Twitter over it, and yesterday their new meme generator got a good bit of coverage. In the meantime, two more new functions have been added to Google+’s growing slew of features. The arrival of both was announced via two Googlers’ own Google+ accounts, which shows how Google are attempting to keep things on the network personable and in-house.

Share from Search Results

Today, another Googler, Alex Unger  unveiled yet another new feature that enables conversations to begin via search results. On his Google+ profile, Unger explains:

“Today we’re introducing a new feature that lets you share directly from Google+ search results, and contribute to a topical Google+ stream. For example, if you search for basketball and then want to make a post about how your favorite team or player is doing, you can share right from the search results.”

When a user posts from the search results page, others are able to join in on the conversation that was initiated by search results, as a link to the original search stream is included when someone posts from it.

Record Video

Yesterday, a Google+ Photos engineer Shana Gitnick  announced that video sharing has now become seamlesss via the network with a ‘Record Video’ function. Users are now able to record themselves on their webcams and immediately attach the videos to their posts, negating the need to use another application to create a video and then upload it to Google+, speeding up the process and most likely resulting in more video content on the site.All these new features point to the direction that Google+ is heading towards – to become as seamless as possible and become the central hub for all your online activity. It will be interesting to see if these new features will do anything to entice new users to the network.