Since it was launched in July, Google+ has been the subject of dozens
of different tutorials. I’m not going to rehash them all because the
site is pretty self-explanatory, but there are a lot of fun things you
can do if you take the time to learn the interface.
However, I want to go over some of the basic features, and specifically how you can use them. So, strap in, because we’re about to do a high speed run through of the Google+ features.
There are a lot of resources online that attempt to go through everything Google+ has to offer and show you how to use the software. I aim to offer one of those resources, but mine is going to be different.
How so, you ask? It’s going to be bigger, badder and much more awesomer. That and I plan on supplementing it with detailed video walkthroughs (see your membership area). Without further ado, let’s look at everything Google has implemented in their newest social media release.
For a few months Google+ was an invite only service. Today it’s open to everyone. So, signing up couldn’t be easier. Just go to:
http://plus.google.com
From here, click the “Join Google+” button and you’ll be allowed to signup with your Google account.
If you do not have a Google account, you’ll need to create one now. To do so, go through the button at the top that says “Create an Account”
Once you have your account created, you can sign in to Google+ with your email address and password.
If you need to create an account, remember that you can use this same account for dozens of Google services like Gmail, Docs, YouTube and more. I recommend you use a gmail account in conjunction with your Google+ account to get the most out of it.
On the signup page, you should provide the basic information requested. Name, gender and birthday, as well as your profile photo. We’ll go over profile photos in more depth shortly – for now, make sure you have something at least 200×200 of you smiling.
One more note – by default Google allows itself to use your information to personalize content in its search engines and advertising network. If you’re a stickler for privacy, you may want to uncheck this box.
Once you signup, you’ll be asked to fill in some basic information. I actually skip this for now and like to fill it in on my personal profile page – this allows me to format and personalize everything on that page just how I like it.
Google+ automatically recommends people from your gmail account if you have one, but you can also signin to Yahoo! and Hotmail and have Google search through those lists to find people you may know. There’s a really cool trick you can use with Yahoo! Mail and your Facebook Contacts as well if you want to add people from your Facebook contacts list.
There’s more on that in a later chapter.
As you can see, I already have a suggestion. Bear with me as this is a second gmail account I use (not my main one, which already has a G+ account attached to it), so you may see some goofy names in the recommendations boxes. But, in this case, Joe Bob Kazoo is recommended because he is in my contacts list in Gmail.
Again, I can connect with Yahoo! and Hotmail and get people from there too. Remember that whenever you add someone to your Google+ profile, you must place them in a circle – we’ll go over creating these circles shortly.
If you don’t have anyone to follow in your own social circle, don’t forget about the famous people. Google is all too happy to show off it’s ever expanding list of famous users. From will.i.am to Britney Spears there is a growing list of hot users to keep track of.
You can narrow down the field by categories too in the top right corner. Again, I would wait to do this and unless you really care what Britney has to say about her latest tour, probably don’t add anyone just yet.
We made it! The first stop on our login is the home page of a new Google+ account. This is what your account will look like whenever you login, though usually with a lot more stuff on the screen – pictures, streams, shares, etc.
In this particular case, I want to draw your attention to a couple of spots.
This is the home bar – from here you can switch between your stream, photos, profile view, circles and yes…games.
Note: For everyone out there who loathes the idea of gaming in your social media, you can delete the Games channel from the home bar with a clever Chrome extension – see the tools section for more details.
For Google+ to be effective it needs users. While the invite-only period in Google+’s lifespan is now over, we still need to do our part to boost the number of people using the service.
You can use your Gmail account to populate the invitation list:
Next up, it’s important to set up your profile. No social network is complete without a well-built profile so people can learn about you.
Click the “complete your profile’ button and you’ll be asked to fill in a few simple pieces of information.
So, you want a professional, high-quality screenshot included as your profile photo. In fact, Google+ pretty much requires you to have a higher quality photo than other websites like Twitter or Facebook.
Take a quick look at mine.
As you can see it’s significantly larger than a normal Facebook photo. This is the default size though. So, find a really good photo of yourself, upload it now, and possibly add a few more to your gallery just to have something there.
Circles are fun because you can control which Circles see your updates, which Circles you see, and how you interact with those Circles.
I recommend you create at least five Circles right now in which you can place new friends. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can follow people on Google+ like you would on Twitter. If you add somebody to your Circle it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are in one of their Circles.
This may seem a little complicated at first, but if you just think of it as a combination of Facebook’s friend lists and Twitter’s followers it makes a lot more sense.
Basically, when you add somebody to a Circle, you are saying that you want to see their updates. If they add you back, they want to see your updates. Unlike Facebook, where both parties need to agree to be friends, Google+ allows a one-way follow.
Keep in mind, however, that if you add somebody to one of your Circles, and they don’t add you back, you can only see their public updates. If they post information to a private Circle that includes friends, family, or business associates that you’re not a part of, you won’t be able to see their updates. So, it’s still in your best interest to create relationships and develop two-way connections with people.
There a lot of interesting things we can do with this. At this point, with the population where it’s at, things are still growing. But as Google+ approaches Twitter’s population, there are a lot of interesting things were going to be able to do with Circles.
Now, whenever you find an interesting article, image, or link and don’t have time to look at it, put it in your personal Circle. The stream in this Circle will now include links to things that you’re interested in but haven’t read or watched yet.
You can create multiple Circles this way, essentially creating what is in an online notebook. There are of course dozens of tools that do similar things, but Google+ allows you to centralize your efforts into a single profile.
You can create a Hangout and people can join whenever they want, without having to be invited or “called”. It’s less like a “phone call” and more like chat roulette (without the dirtiness).
Up to 10 people at a time can join a Hangout and you can share information or watch YouTube videos together. Imagine what you’ll be able to do with this tool creating private webinars and conferences with people. Already business owners are putting together seminars, coaching sessions, and classes in Hangouts that previously would’ve been much more complicated or required special webcasting software.
It’s like Google Alerts built directly into your social network. Most of the content in Sparks is drawn from Google News and Blog Search, ensuring it is all time sensitive and while filtering needs some fine tuning, the results are still very impressive.
Facebook may be able to copy a LOT of what Google+ has to offer, but search is one area they will never catch up.
Feel free to delete any of them or change the names. I personally only kept “Family” and “Friends” for my circles as they are practical.
Add them now to the circles that fit their relationship to you. In the chapter on Circles I describe why to create the following circles. For now, just create them:
Now, you can see the people I’ve added to my circles here. As this is a new account, the list is still pretty sparse – mostly just people I know and work with on a regular basis. However, in the next few chapters I’m going to really blow this up and add a ton of new people to my lists.
From here, it’s time to start adding people. See later chapters on growing your circles to learn more about how to really expand your list of followers using some tricky strategies I’ve developed in the last couple of months.
For now, just add the people you already know and anyone you can think of that you’d like to follow – thought leaders in particular are great additions at this junction.
A quick trick I want to share – you can add yourself to a circle too. Simply type your name into the search box and when it shows up, click “Add to Circle” on your profile:
Now, create a new circle and title it “Notes” or “Drafts” and put yourself in that circle. Now, when you share with yourself, you can put aside notes, drafts or other thoughts in a simple, easy to access location.
But, for that to work, you need to do your part and invite everyone you know to signup. There is a handy “Send Invites” button on the right sidebar of your profile page to do just that.
Click on it and you can invite people by adding their email addresses to the box.
Google only gives you 150 invites to start with, but let’s be honest – they don’t really care how many people you invite. This is just to create a sense of scarcity that doesn’t actually exist.
So, if you max out your invites in a couple days, Google will eventually replenish them. You can also get around their limits by simply sending stuff to people that don’t yet have an account.
One trick is to add someone to a Circle who doesn’t yet have an account. They will be emailed asking them to signup for Google+ when you do that.
Another trick is to tag someone or share a post to your Stream with them by email address. Again, they will be sent an invite to signup automatically when you do this.
The share box is located at the top of your login page – the same as any of the other social networks. However, there are a few differences.
Once you type up what you want to share or add in a photo, video or link (see the buttons below), you can decide who sees your share.
Simply type or paste a link into the box if you want to share a specific website and Google+ will extract the information needed to share it with your circles.
Use Google’s familiar little “Places” icon to tag your share with a location:
Sharing with people is as simple as clicking the button below:
Now, select which circles you want to share with from the list that appears. If you select specific circles, your post is considered “private” meaning it won’t show up in the search engines.
That is important to remember if you plan on trying to gain SERPs with your posts. They need to be public to reach that level of saturation.
Another trick is to share your posts with your extended circle.
When you click your “extended circle” Google+ automatically adds everyone who is connected with your connects. If you’ve used LinkedIn you know the theory behind this – you can reach out to an exponential number of people this way.
Of course, there are limits. If you spam someone with extended circle updates, you’ll be blocked – get blocked enough and Google+ will revoke your extended circle privileges. But, that said, you can do a lot of fun things this way if you know how to use it properly.
Another trick you should take advantage of is notifications. If you share something with people in a circle, you can click a button to also send them a notification that you shared something with them. Again, this will allow you to reach a much larger audience much faster.
Wondering why’d you’d ever want to do this? Look at the top of the screen when logged into Gmail – do you see the little gray icon with a “0” on it? That’s your notification box. When someone sends you something or you get a new follower, a “1” pops up there and it turns red.
Now, you can show up in that box for your targeted messages, plus it will send them an email if they request email notifications as well. Talk about targeted messaging.
Last thing I want to talk about regarding this topic: if you add someone to a circle that doesn’t yet have a Google+ account, you can click a little button on the share box that allows you to send them an email with your new share:
Easy way to entice someone to join Google+ and follow you. Great for client lists and customer lists too.
However, not everything in Google+ has an analog elsewhere. Some features are truly innovative, which makes them all the more exciting. Hangouts are one example of this type of feature.
Sounds interesting, right? Let’s go over how to get one started.
To start a new Hangout, just click the green “Start a hangout” button on the lower right of your home page.
That will launch a new browser window, which is where the Hangout will be housed. The browser window will look like this:
If everything is going according to plan – and you have a webcam — you will see yourself in that black box. Check your settings, add friends to the Hangout, then click the green button to launch.
Your Hangout space will consist of webcam and audio feeds from you and all the people participating the Hangout. The Hangout will look like the screenshot below; however, mine is a little disappointing because there’s no one else in it:
Ordinarily,
there would be people in the space where the sad, balloon-carrying
robot is standing. For now, you can just use your imagination. Oh, and
your webcam feed will be displayed in that little black box.
Let’s Hang Out!
Now that you have your Hangout all set up and running, take a second to explore some of the cool settings and features:
Chat
Click that little Chat button on the bottom of the Hangout window, and up comes a chat box along the side of the screen. Pretty basic, really. Basically the same ol’ chat we have all been using on the Internet for years. Still, a good tool for small seminars where the attendees need to ask questions of the presenter, for example.
YouTube
This feature is pretty cool. Click the YouTube button at the bottom of the screen, and upcomes
an embedded YouTube window. You can use this to share videos with your
friends, show instructional videos to a small class or give a marketing
presentation to a group of potential investors. Every YouTube video is
available for viewing, and everyone in the Hangout sees the video at
once.
Invite
You can invite more users to the Hangout at any time just be clicking the Invite button at the bottom of the screen. You can add individual users or whole Circles.
Muting
To temporarily turn off your webcam and/or microphone, just use the Mute functions located in the lower left corner. This screenshot shows them in muted mode. You can tell by the slash marks through the buttons, as well as the blank webcam display and the red microphone icon in the upper right of the webcam display. Click the buttons again to turn these features back on.
Settings
Here you can adjust the settings of your webcam, microphone and speakers. Nothing too exciting here, but still good to know.
Hangouts are pretty great because they are not only highly functional, but also pretty easy to use. Any time you need to communicate with a group of people in real time, whether by video, audio or just plain text, Hangouts are a good option.
Now, we can do a lot more with what we’ve been given.
To use Sparks (which does still exist), simply search for a topic in which you’re interested in the search box at the top of your profile:
In this case, I searched for Copywriting. Now, the search will pop up with four possible options:
The first is “Everything” – this compiles the best of the people in your circles, your posts, and Sparks.
However, if you want to narrow things down, click one of the other three tabs in this interface. The first one, People, is fantastic if you’re looking for new people to add to your circles.
Say I want to add people who know about Copywriting to my circle.
Now I can do just that. Here are a few great copywriting options with Google+ accounts.
Of course, you don’t always want to find new people. What about the Google+ posts. The millions of shares going out every day need to be streamlined into an easily digestible interface and the search function let’s do that.
Now, I can see all the recent posts on Google+ for this topic. Better yet, I can narrow it down by “most recent” or “best of”. In both cases, they draw from your extended circles first and then look toward the larger collection of people out there.
Finally, there is Sparks, which was the original search function in Google+
However, I want to go over some of the basic features, and specifically how you can use them. So, strap in, because we’re about to do a high speed run through of the Google+ features.
There are a lot of resources online that attempt to go through everything Google+ has to offer and show you how to use the software. I aim to offer one of those resources, but mine is going to be different.
How so, you ask? It’s going to be bigger, badder and much more awesomer. That and I plan on supplementing it with detailed video walkthroughs (see your membership area). Without further ado, let’s look at everything Google has implemented in their newest social media release.
Signing Up
For a few months Google+ was an invite only service. Today it’s open to everyone. So, signing up couldn’t be easier. Just go to:
http://plus.google.com
From here, click the “Join Google+” button and you’ll be allowed to signup with your Google account.
If you do not have a Google account, you’ll need to create one now. To do so, go through the button at the top that says “Create an Account”
Once you have your account created, you can sign in to Google+ with your email address and password.
If you need to create an account, remember that you can use this same account for dozens of Google services like Gmail, Docs, YouTube and more. I recommend you use a gmail account in conjunction with your Google+ account to get the most out of it.
On the signup page, you should provide the basic information requested. Name, gender and birthday, as well as your profile photo. We’ll go over profile photos in more depth shortly – for now, make sure you have something at least 200×200 of you smiling.
One more note – by default Google allows itself to use your information to personalize content in its search engines and advertising network. If you’re a stickler for privacy, you may want to uncheck this box.
Once you signup, you’ll be asked to fill in some basic information. I actually skip this for now and like to fill it in on my personal profile page – this allows me to format and personalize everything on that page just how I like it.
Google+ automatically recommends people from your gmail account if you have one, but you can also signin to Yahoo! and Hotmail and have Google search through those lists to find people you may know. There’s a really cool trick you can use with Yahoo! Mail and your Facebook Contacts as well if you want to add people from your Facebook contacts list.
There’s more on that in a later chapter.
As you can see, I already have a suggestion. Bear with me as this is a second gmail account I use (not my main one, which already has a G+ account attached to it), so you may see some goofy names in the recommendations boxes. But, in this case, Joe Bob Kazoo is recommended because he is in my contacts list in Gmail.
Again, I can connect with Yahoo! and Hotmail and get people from there too. Remember that whenever you add someone to your Google+ profile, you must place them in a circle – we’ll go over creating these circles shortly.
If you don’t have anyone to follow in your own social circle, don’t forget about the famous people. Google is all too happy to show off it’s ever expanding list of famous users. From will.i.am to Britney Spears there is a growing list of hot users to keep track of.
You can narrow down the field by categories too in the top right corner. Again, I would wait to do this and unless you really care what Britney has to say about her latest tour, probably don’t add anyone just yet.
We made it! The first stop on our login is the home page of a new Google+ account. This is what your account will look like whenever you login, though usually with a lot more stuff on the screen – pictures, streams, shares, etc.
In this particular case, I want to draw your attention to a couple of spots.
This is the home bar – from here you can switch between your stream, photos, profile view, circles and yes…games.Note: For everyone out there who loathes the idea of gaming in your social media, you can delete the Games channel from the home bar with a clever Chrome extension – see the tools section for more details.
More Details: Sending Invitations
For Google+ to be effective it needs users. While the invite-only period in Google+’s lifespan is now over, we still need to do our part to boost the number of people using the service.
You can use your Gmail account to populate the invitation list:
Next up, it’s important to set up your profile. No social network is complete without a well-built profile so people can learn about you.
Click the “complete your profile’ button and you’ll be asked to fill in a few simple pieces of information.
Your Profile Photo
Google+ allows you to do something pretty cool with your screenshots. You can claim blogs and websites that you own and your picture will show up next to them in the search results.So, you want a professional, high-quality screenshot included as your profile photo. In fact, Google+ pretty much requires you to have a higher quality photo than other websites like Twitter or Facebook.
Take a quick look at mine.
As you can see it’s significantly larger than a normal Facebook photo. This is the default size though. So, find a really good photo of yourself, upload it now, and possibly add a few more to your gallery just to have something there.
Circles
One of the biggest problems that Facebook had was that you couldn’t separate out your friends by categories. Google+ has this function built-in with Circles. Anytime you have a new friend or follow somebody on Google+, you add them to a Circle. You can add each person to multiple Circles if you like, allowing you to control who sees what you post.Circles are fun because you can control which Circles see your updates, which Circles you see, and how you interact with those Circles.
I recommend you create at least five Circles right now in which you can place new friends. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can follow people on Google+ like you would on Twitter. If you add somebody to your Circle it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are in one of their Circles.
This may seem a little complicated at first, but if you just think of it as a combination of Facebook’s friend lists and Twitter’s followers it makes a lot more sense.
Basically, when you add somebody to a Circle, you are saying that you want to see their updates. If they add you back, they want to see your updates. Unlike Facebook, where both parties need to agree to be friends, Google+ allows a one-way follow.
Keep in mind, however, that if you add somebody to one of your Circles, and they don’t add you back, you can only see their public updates. If they post information to a private Circle that includes friends, family, or business associates that you’re not a part of, you won’t be able to see their updates. So, it’s still in your best interest to create relationships and develop two-way connections with people.
There a lot of interesting things we can do with this. At this point, with the population where it’s at, things are still growing. But as Google+ approaches Twitter’s population, there are a lot of interesting things were going to be able to do with Circles.
Circles as Tools
One of the cool things must Circles is that you can use them to store information. To do this, create a single Circle with only one person…yourself.Now, whenever you find an interesting article, image, or link and don’t have time to look at it, put it in your personal Circle. The stream in this Circle will now include links to things that you’re interested in but haven’t read or watched yet.
You can create multiple Circles this way, essentially creating what is in an online notebook. There are of course dozens of tools that do similar things, but Google+ allows you to centralize your efforts into a single profile.
Hangouts
Google+ hangouts are essentially chat rooms, but with a special twist.You can create a Hangout and people can join whenever they want, without having to be invited or “called”. It’s less like a “phone call” and more like chat roulette (without the dirtiness).
Up to 10 people at a time can join a Hangout and you can share information or watch YouTube videos together. Imagine what you’ll be able to do with this tool creating private webinars and conferences with people. Already business owners are putting together seminars, coaching sessions, and classes in Hangouts that previously would’ve been much more complicated or required special webcasting software.
Sparks
Another great tool that fits perfectly with Google’s persona. Sparks allows users to search for specific terms or “tags” on Google+ and receive updates whenever something pops up that matches their search.It’s like Google Alerts built directly into your social network. Most of the content in Sparks is drawn from Google News and Blog Search, ensuring it is all time sensitive and while filtering needs some fine tuning, the results are still very impressive.
Facebook may be able to copy a LOT of what Google+ has to offer, but search is one area they will never catch up.
Your Circles
When you first click on the Circles box atop your screen, you’ll see the following circles – created by default in Google+Feel free to delete any of them or change the names. I personally only kept “Family” and “Friends” for my circles as they are practical.
Add them now to the circles that fit their relationship to you. In the chapter on Circles I describe why to create the following circles. For now, just create them:
Now, you can see the people I’ve added to my circles here. As this is a new account, the list is still pretty sparse – mostly just people I know and work with on a regular basis. However, in the next few chapters I’m going to really blow this up and add a ton of new people to my lists.
From here, it’s time to start adding people. See later chapters on growing your circles to learn more about how to really expand your list of followers using some tricky strategies I’ve developed in the last couple of months.
For now, just add the people you already know and anyone you can think of that you’d like to follow – thought leaders in particular are great additions at this junction.
A quick trick I want to share – you can add yourself to a circle too. Simply type your name into the search box and when it shows up, click “Add to Circle” on your profile:
Now, create a new circle and title it “Notes” or “Drafts” and put yourself in that circle. Now, when you share with yourself, you can put aside notes, drafts or other thoughts in a simple, easy to access location.
Inviting Other People
Google+ is now in an open beta meaning anyone can join without an invitation, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t send out more invitations. If you really dig Google+ (like I do ), then you will want as many people you know as possible to use the service.But, for that to work, you need to do your part and invite everyone you know to signup. There is a handy “Send Invites” button on the right sidebar of your profile page to do just that.
Click on it and you can invite people by adding their email addresses to the box.
Google only gives you 150 invites to start with, but let’s be honest – they don’t really care how many people you invite. This is just to create a sense of scarcity that doesn’t actually exist.
So, if you max out your invites in a couple days, Google will eventually replenish them. You can also get around their limits by simply sending stuff to people that don’t yet have an account.
One trick is to add someone to a Circle who doesn’t yet have an account. They will be emailed asking them to signup for Google+ when you do that.
Another trick is to tag someone or share a post to your Stream with them by email address. Again, they will be sent an invite to signup automatically when you do this.
Sharing
Once you have a few people in your circles, it’s time to start posting things to your Stream. People need to know you’re not only interesting but active on the site.The share box is located at the top of your login page – the same as any of the other social networks. However, there are a few differences.
Once you type up what you want to share or add in a photo, video or link (see the buttons below), you can decide who sees your share.
Simply type or paste a link into the box if you want to share a specific website and Google+ will extract the information needed to share it with your circles.
Use Google’s familiar little “Places” icon to tag your share with a location:
Sharing with people is as simple as clicking the button below:
Now, select which circles you want to share with from the list that appears. If you select specific circles, your post is considered “private” meaning it won’t show up in the search engines.
That is important to remember if you plan on trying to gain SERPs with your posts. They need to be public to reach that level of saturation.
Another trick is to share your posts with your extended circle.
When you click your “extended circle” Google+ automatically adds everyone who is connected with your connects. If you’ve used LinkedIn you know the theory behind this – you can reach out to an exponential number of people this way.
Of course, there are limits. If you spam someone with extended circle updates, you’ll be blocked – get blocked enough and Google+ will revoke your extended circle privileges. But, that said, you can do a lot of fun things this way if you know how to use it properly.
Another trick you should take advantage of is notifications. If you share something with people in a circle, you can click a button to also send them a notification that you shared something with them. Again, this will allow you to reach a much larger audience much faster.
Wondering why’d you’d ever want to do this? Look at the top of the screen when logged into Gmail – do you see the little gray icon with a “0” on it? That’s your notification box. When someone sends you something or you get a new follower, a “1” pops up there and it turns red.
Now, you can show up in that box for your targeted messages, plus it will send them an email if they request email notifications as well. Talk about targeted messaging.
Last thing I want to talk about regarding this topic: if you add someone to a circle that doesn’t yet have a Google+ account, you can click a little button on the share box that allows you to send them an email with your new share:
Easy way to entice someone to join Google+ and follow you. Great for client lists and customer lists too.
Hangouts
Throughout these tutorial articles, I have drawn comparisons between Google+ and other social networks, as a way to help make new features more relatable. As examples, the Stream is like a Twitter timeline and the +1 button is like the Facebook “Like” button.However, not everything in Google+ has an analog elsewhere. Some features are truly innovative, which makes them all the more exciting. Hangouts are one example of this type of feature.
What is a Hangout?
Essentially, a Hangout is like a chat room, but more so. If a chat room is an original Nintendo, then a Hangout is the Nintendo Wii. In a Hangout, you and several members of your network can chat, video conference and watch YouTube videos together. It can be a great tool to do small seminars for customers or conference with distant acquaintances, as well as fun toy to share with your friends.Sounds interesting, right? Let’s go over how to get one started.
To start a new Hangout, just click the green “Start a hangout” button on the lower right of your home page.
That will launch a new browser window, which is where the Hangout will be housed. The browser window will look like this:
If everything is going according to plan – and you have a webcam — you will see yourself in that black box. Check your settings, add friends to the Hangout, then click the green button to launch.
Your Hangout space will consist of webcam and audio feeds from you and all the people participating the Hangout. The Hangout will look like the screenshot below; however, mine is a little disappointing because there’s no one else in it:
Ordinarily,
there would be people in the space where the sad, balloon-carrying
robot is standing. For now, you can just use your imagination. Oh, and
your webcam feed will be displayed in that little black box.Let’s Hang Out!
Now that you have your Hangout all set up and running, take a second to explore some of the cool settings and features:
Chat
Click that little Chat button on the bottom of the Hangout window, and up comes a chat box along the side of the screen. Pretty basic, really. Basically the same ol’ chat we have all been using on the Internet for years. Still, a good tool for small seminars where the attendees need to ask questions of the presenter, for example.
YouTube
This feature is pretty cool. Click the YouTube button at the bottom of the screen, and upcomes
an embedded YouTube window. You can use this to share videos with your
friends, show instructional videos to a small class or give a marketing
presentation to a group of potential investors. Every YouTube video is
available for viewing, and everyone in the Hangout sees the video at
once.Invite
You can invite more users to the Hangout at any time just be clicking the Invite button at the bottom of the screen. You can add individual users or whole Circles.
Muting
To temporarily turn off your webcam and/or microphone, just use the Mute functions located in the lower left corner. This screenshot shows them in muted mode. You can tell by the slash marks through the buttons, as well as the blank webcam display and the red microphone icon in the upper right of the webcam display. Click the buttons again to turn these features back on.
Settings
Here you can adjust the settings of your webcam, microphone and speakers. Nothing too exciting here, but still good to know.Hangouts are pretty great because they are not only highly functional, but also pretty easy to use. Any time you need to communicate with a group of people in real time, whether by video, audio or just plain text, Hangouts are a good option.
Sparks and Saved Searches
When Google opened up their social network to the masses, they changed how Sparks works (so forgive me if any other content in the package is not yet updated). The goal of the update was to integrate a search engine into Google+, something sorely missing from the early invite-only builds.Now, we can do a lot more with what we’ve been given.
To use Sparks (which does still exist), simply search for a topic in which you’re interested in the search box at the top of your profile:
In this case, I searched for Copywriting. Now, the search will pop up with four possible options:The first is “Everything” – this compiles the best of the people in your circles, your posts, and Sparks.
However, if you want to narrow things down, click one of the other three tabs in this interface. The first one, People, is fantastic if you’re looking for new people to add to your circles.
Say I want to add people who know about Copywriting to my circle.
Now I can do just that. Here are a few great copywriting options with Google+ accounts.
Of course, you don’t always want to find new people. What about the Google+ posts. The millions of shares going out every day need to be streamlined into an easily digestible interface and the search function let’s do that.
Now, I can see all the recent posts on Google+ for this topic. Better yet, I can narrow it down by “most recent” or “best of”. In both cases, they draw from your extended circles first and then look toward the larger collection of people out there.
Finally, there is Sparks, which was the original search function in Google+
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