Google+ has long been the best nerd-filled social network your mom hasn’t caught onto yet. On Friday, it got even better.
The Mountain View company has rolled 24 new features into the Google+ experience, and all of these new additions are now available in for iOS, Android and web users. On top of that, Google has redesigned its social network’s iPhone app, too.
Our first assessment of the big push: wherever you use it (if you’re one of the 135 million on the service), Google+ has improved.
The new iPhone app (version 4.0 if you’re keeping score) moves the look and feel of G+ stylistically closer to Google’s other iOS apps — the fantastic Google+ for iPad, Google Maps for iPhone, Gmail for iPhone and the Google Search iPhone app. Previously, Google+ on the iPhone had a look all its own, using a lot of black and dark gray across the interface, with a great deal of real estate given to photos. It was beautiful, and it made me wish more people used Google+, because that would make it more exciting to interact with. Alas, most of my friends — like 800 million other humans on the web — are turning to Facebook over Google+ to share and network with the world. And while that likely won’t change anytime too soon, the iPhone redesign greatly rewards those who do use G+.
The new look is airy with lots of white space, and it brings a level of personality and charm not many social networking apps (outside of Path) can match.
The use of dark regions is now confined to a black bar across the bottom of the default view — this bar is where the stream of incoming posts from your Circles shows up. The bar disappears as you’re scrolling through your stream, only to return when you’re not scrolling — which is when you’d actually want to use it. In the bar are four buttons: share a photo, check into a location, share a link from the web, or type a post. Each of the four buttons uses one of the four colors from Google’s logo — blue for photos, red for check-ins, yellow for links and green for written words. Gone is the black background, which has been replaced by a light gray color. Posts show up on white cards reminiscent of Android’s Google Now cards. Speaking of Android, the Google+ Android app remains the same for the most part, but it now also has this re-appearing black bar on its stream view.
Like the old app, you can choose which of your circles shows up in the stream view by tapping on a button at the top of the app. And, like the old app, refreshing your stream is done by the familiar pull-to-refresh action. Tug downwards on your stream and four bars show up above the most recent post, thinning as you stretch them. Let go and the text changes to “loading,” and the bars blink one at a time until the loading completes. It’s a nice embellishment.
Google+ on Android and iOS have largely the same user interface design. Both look and work great. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
Press the button in the top-left corner to reveal a main navigation menu — access your profile, find people, photos, Communities (Google+’s answer to Facebook’s Groups), Events, Hangout video chats, Messenger (Google+’s alternative to, uh, Facebook Messenger), as well as search and settings. All of this, as it was before, is rendered on a dark grey background. The use of dark-shaded menus behind lighter cards of information is a design scheme used on Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube on iOS too. If you scroll past this menu, sitting below are notifications that alert you to any comments or shares of posts, as well as any mentions of you in another’s post or photo.
Functionally, not much has changed — you can largely do all the same stuff as before. This update is all about looks and design, and Google+ is certainly now the best-looking social networking app available for the iPhone.
As far as the rest of the updates go, Google+ users can now edit their profiles on both Android and iOS, subscribe to notifications from Circles, and use Google+ Communities on their mobile devices for the first time.
Some enhancements for Android users: full-size photos are now backed up on Google+, Photo Spheres can now be seen in the stream, and animated GIFs are (finally) supported. Google+ on Android is also more tightly integrated with Google Now, and birthday reminders culled from your contacts show up on Google Now cards. Jelly Bean users also gain Google+ lock-screen widgets.
One letdown: the new emoticons you can drop into posts to share your mood. They’re cute, but they feel way too MySpacey. The emoticons also don’t show up on Google+’s iOS app, and they appear as a blue link on the web.
Google+ Events, first announced at Google I/O back in June, have been tweaked as well. Create a Google+ event and you can now message specific guests, see who’s peeked at their invite, or share an event by pasting a URL into an e-mail. And now, when you RSVP to a Google+ event, you can tell the event planner how many people you’re brining along.
Finally, the Hangouts section gets an update. There’s a new “ultra-low bandwidth mode” that will stream a muddied, low resolution image if your internet connection stinks. Better than nothing, right? When one person is hanging out by themselves, the bar that normally shows up across the bottom of the video chat window and displays the faces of your video chat companions disappears. It’s an attempt to help you forget you’re hanging out solo. Maybe these enhancements will encourage more people to check out Google+, and that won’t happen as often.
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