UPDATED 13:20 EST / DECEMBER 19 2011

Google+ Unleashes Updates for Circles, Photos and Businesses

There will be a few Google+ improvements to roll out before the New Year for the social network’s avid users to tinker during the holiday season, some of which materialized due to insistent popular demand. One of these “fine-grained controls” will enable you to “graphic-equalize and fine-tune your system.”

When you view the stream of a particular circle, there will be a slider at the top that will allow you to adjust how the posts from the circle will blend into the main stream. This way, you can arrange the settings to form your own “perfect stream” so you don’t miss a post from a person of interest.

The search giant redesigned the Google Bar as well, to allow you to get sneak previews of social content from your stream instead of arduously navigating through the content to see details in full, for quicker identification of what’s worthy of a read. Google also lets you see the +1’s and shares your posts received since your last sign-in.

As for business, Google+ Pages experienced tweaks and additions based on users’ “most oft-requested features.” This includes the following:

• You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page.
• A new notification flow will ensure that these managers stay in the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page, giving managers the ability to stay involved in page conversations.
• We’ll now show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle. This way, both you and your page’s visitors can get an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with your page.

Google+ boasts a plethora of improvements to its photo experience too. Viewing photos in Lighbox “has been completely redesigned with improved navigation, enhanced comment legibility and better overall utility.” A new way of photo-tagging is added to let people quickly focus on certain people.

Other things Google:

British Telecom follows the footsteps of Apple, Oracle, Microsoft and eBay as it sues the search giant over a handful of patent issues. BT says Google infringed their patents to embed on the latter’s search engines, Android systems, Google+ social network, eBooks, Maps, Offers, Docs, Places, Gmail, Doubleclick advertising management system, AdWords advertisement listing program and just about everything regarding their current ecosystem.

On the other hand, Google focuses on other things and offers Android training with Flash Players 11.1. They’re also prepping for their own version of Siri,  calling their new AI Majel.


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