Doing More With Less Since 1972
On the mobile app, when I take a photo to post to G+, why isn’t there a step in there that lets me apply a filter a la Instagram? Seems like a feature they could implement pretty easily, but it’s not there.
At least give this to users with Android devices, you know?
I’m sure I’m not alone in receiving those emails with ‘FW:” in the subject line. That’s why I continue to lose interest in Facebook. It has increasingly become a place where many people post everything from the ‘net they deem neat.
I remember telling someone 4 or 5 years ago how Facebook was so great because it wasn’t all spammy like MySpace. That and, “your mom isn’t on there”. Guess where your mom is now? And feel lucky if people are posting the forwards on Facebook instead of continuing to email them. My prediction is that it’s about to get a lot worse…wait and see what Facebook’s earnings are today. Now that they’re beholden to shareholders, something’s going to have to be done to increase their revenues.
There will be ads. Lots of ads. Right along-side all that useless content.
Invest a week into really using Plus. I mean really using it. It doesn’t disappoint.
Well…unless you want them to open up the API. Tick tock.
Google added some really nice touches to Plus Photos yesterday–pretty lightboxes, and better navigation for tagging and comments.
But there are a couple of problems I still have…
Photos and Picasa are basically the same thing now, but in order to manage my albums, I have to go over to Picasa and move/copy/delete. There isn’t any album management available in Plus anywhere. Kind of weird.
I’d also love to have stuff like red eye elimination available in Plus.
I know Google is releasing new features to Plus every day, but I don’t get why they haven’t included some very basic photo management and editing functionality yet.
I’ve shared plenty of photos from my phone on Google+, but in the last couple of days I’ve started uploading larger albums there. The display of photo albums within Plus is very nice (waaaaaaaay cleaner than Facebook), and if you upload through Plus instead of Picasa, your photos get auto-resized and don’t count towards your Picasa limits:
If you’ve signed up for Google+
Free storage limits
Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage.
Automatic resizing
All photos uploaded in Google+ will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge) and won’t count towards your free storage quota.
Well, sorta. You can only have 10,000 albums and you can only have 1,000 photos within an album. Maybe not enough for pros, but plenty for people who just want to share with the fam.
So all you have to do to back up all of your photos is upload them through Plus set to private. Then go over to Picasa, create new albums and move/copy photos into them to share.
My one complaint is that the beautiful photo album layouts we see on the Plus website haven’t made it to the Android applications yet. It would be nice to get the same broad overview when browsing photos on a tablet.
I’ve been noticing lots of the people I follow on Twitter have been connecting up with me on Google+ over the last few days. Some of these folks are using Google+ in the same way they use Twitter and putting out a steady stream of status updates. Of course, it’s kind of Twitter in reverse. Instead of “following” the way you do on Twitter, Google+ lets you choose who you want to “Share” with.
It seems like over-share in the beginning, but when you think about it, it’s kind of nice. Because Google+ lets you decide who you want to share with, it also lets you decide whose updates are going to make it to your main stream and which people who are sharing with you are going to get chucked into the “Incoming” bin.
Not that I don’t care about these people and what they are up to. I do. That’s why I follow them on Twitter. But I may not care so much that I need to be notified if they’ve said something new. Twitter is nice in that way. If I choose to go back and read their full stream I can. But for me, Twitter is more about what’s going on in real time, and I seldom have the urge to go back and read any stream history.
And for the Twitter folks I follow who I’m not sharing with on Google+, there’s no reason to feel rejected. The stuff those folks would care about is still flying out publicly on Twitter (and maybe even on Buzz). I promise, I’m not sharing anything on G+ that’s earth shattering or ground breaking. It’s mostly stuff I don’t like putting on Facebook. You know–stuff that people who have known me personally for years may care about.
My favorite thing about Google + so far is that I have yet to receive a notification that someone got a high score on Farmville, a flood of happy birthday wishes from people who would have no idea when my birthday was if they weren’t forced to know, or an invitation to find out what my cat’s stripper name is.
How To Move Your Facebook Photos To Picasa – Get them over to Picasa/GooglePhotos/Plus. One step closer to ditching Facebook forever.
Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends – It’s ON! HT @slashdot.
Fast-food chains selling alcohol – HT @FrankStrovel. I will not rest until I can get a Cherry-Vodka-Limeade straight from the drive-up window.
RunKeeper Building ‘The Facebook Of Fitness’ – I started using RunKeeper when it became free, and at the time it was just the mobile app that drew me to it. I was using DailyMile as my “Fitness Facebook”, but was pretty frustrated at having to keep transferring from one system to the other. Looks like DailyMile may have missed the boat. I’ll know more when I’m able to work out more regularly.
The 5 Switches of Manliness: Nature – The last post in this series. Every one of them was a great and worth reading.
I’ve been playing with Google Plus for a few days now, and I really like it a lot. One of my favorite features is the Buzz tab on the user profiles. This makes Buzz an almost usable product. I think Google could not only make Buzz more viable but also improve Plus a lot by making a simple change.
Plus needs a Buzz gutter.
I’m seeing lots of people making public updates to Google Plus as if they are using Twitter, and the problem with that is that it’s filling up my Stream with information that…I already get from those people on Twitter. This is a problem with Facebook as well–too much minutia showing up in the main stream. It would be nice if Google would bring Buzz up to the forefront, allowing users to enter those type posts with Buzz. They could also put a Buzz section in the sidebar for “short updates” and have that sorted by Circles just like what you see in the regular Stream.
It’s a pretty simple change, but it could breathe life into an almost dead product while also cleaning up the main Stream, solving one of the other big problems Facebook has.
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