Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Google+ Tips

BRANDS

Google+ currently does not support “entities” that are not people, but they will in the future.
G+ is now accepting applications for “entities” to participate in a “small experiment to see the effects of brands in the G+ experience”.

CHAT

- You have to click on the “Chat with people on Google+” link to enable chat within Google+ but then you get IM functionality.

- When chatting to people you can drag the top of the chatting box to resize the chatting window

- Go start a chat on Google Talk on your phone. Then go over to Google+. The conversation is all there.


CHROME EXTENSIONS

- +Everything:This extension adds the Google+ bar to all websites.

CIRCLES

* If you edit your profile and click on the set of people in your circles, you can control whether or not people can discover who is in your circles. Note that even if it’s public, this just lets people know “Bob is in your circles” – it never reveals which circle people are in. (So it’s completely OK to have a “Jerks, but I want to know what they’re saying” circle.) I’d actually recommend leaving this fairly open; that way, people can go through you and find more people they know. I’ve got mine set so that my circles are visible to other people in my circles.

But one particularly useful thing you can do with this is to change the visibility on a per-circle basis. In particular, you can have some circles that anyone can find out about, some circles which are connections that only other people in your circles can know about, and some circles whose membership is completely private. If you have relationships you’re not comfortable broadcasting, use this feature, it gives you flexibility.

What does it mean for a circle membership to be private? It means that, if you’re only following a person via a private circle, the fact that you’re following this person will not be visible on either your publicly visible profile or theirs; it will be known only to you and to them.

Now, some caveats:

* No, we don’t have a “follow someone and don’t tell them you’re following them” mode. That would be creepy. You can always see who you’re following and who’s following you from your circles page, and when someone starts to follow you you get a notification.

* If that person follows you back, they would need to hide that separately. (If they wanted to) You could still show up on their profile as someone they’re following, and they could show up on your profile as someone following you, but you have control over whether or not you announce that you’re following them.

* If you add a person to both a private circle and a public circle, then the fact that you’re following them is still publicly visible.

* Also, if you change an existing circle from public to private, it may take some time until you disappear from their profile page. Don’t panic if you don’t disappear instantly… and if it’s really important to you to keep a relationship secret, keep it secret from the beginning. (Which is good advice for life in general)

* If you share with this private circle, and someone clicks on the “Limited” link, they’ll still see who can see that post. So if you don’t want members of this circle to know about each other, either, don’t put them all in the same circle and then share with that circle.

- Delete a circle to see a fun animation of the old circle rolling off screen. Create a circle just to delete it.

- Delete a member of a circle by pointing to their image in the circle, clicking on them and dragging them out

- Add multiple people to a circle by going to the Circles page, clicking on them in top section in sequence – they will highlight in blue – then dragging the last one to one of your circles. They will all get dragged along.

- To add people who have added you to their circles, but you haven’t add them, go to the “People who’ve added you” tab and select “Not yet in circles” from the sort menu. All the people not in your circles will be listed first (hat tip to Owen Prater)

- Right click on a circle and select “View circle in tab”. This is a terrific way to see who’s in a circle and allows you to do neat things like drag all the people inside it to another circle.

- +1 Button: Plus one every page you like with only one click, directly from omnibox, without any annoying popup

- Color Bar Changer: Changes color of Google Plus bar to green, pink or blue. Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- Comment Toggle: Allows you to hide/show comments on Google+

- Extended Share for Google Plus: Share Google Plus posts on Facebook & Twitter

-Facebook Friend Exporter: Export your friends’ contact info from Facebook so you can import them into Google+ NOW BLOCKED BY FACEBOOK

- Facebook Like for Google Plus: Not exactly sure what this does but here’s the Google Translate version of this Chinese app description “Facebook more praise by praise ? painless transfer of Google Plus , the future of this product will continue to introduce more painless transfer function.”

- G+ Lite: Google plus lite helps you to access google’s new social networking google plus in lite mode. Its really easy to use this lite version. Whatever that means.

- Google CSS Tricks Chrome Extension to pin the top of your G+ nav bar to the top of the browser screen as you scroll. Very Cool!

- Google Plus HIde Comments: adds a Hide Comments or Show Comments link on each post

- GooglePlus Plus Hide Images: Hides the image on original post and all shared posts. Tired of an animated GIF that keeps getting shared over and over in different posts? – hide it once an forget about it.

- GooglePlus Plus Hide Sidebars: adds a feature to hide/show left and right side bars, and makes the main content wider.

- GooglePlus Plus Search With Google: Search Google Plus with the Google search engine using the site: filter.

- Google Plus Safari Extension: a Safari Extension to give your G+ notification counts as a badge over a button in the toolbar. Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- The Google Plus Unofficial Chrome App: Appears to allow G+ functionality from a browser bar Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- Google+ : Facebook: Make Google Plus look like Facebook. Classic. Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- Google+Tweet: integrates a full featured twitter client inside your Google Plus Account. Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- Helper for Google+: Share G+ posts on Twitter and translate them with Google Translate. Nice.

- Hide Google Plus Notification: Simple extension to hide the little red Google Plus notification from the global google header toolbar.

- Liquid G+: Add a two or three column Google+ display(depending on your screen resolution) (hat tip to Cliff Wade) Warning!: Unofficial, proceed with caution.

- Notification Count for Google Plus: Extension for displaying unread notification count for Google Plus

- +PhotoZoom: Easily zoom photos and profile pics from your Google Plus Stream.

- Replies and More: Adds reply and reply-to-author buttons to Google+ comments

- Scroll To Top Button: Adds a scroll to top or bottom button for quick page navigation.

- Surplus: Allows users to easily access their Google+ notifications and compose new posts from anywhere on the Web. So, this extension lets you read, comment and share without having to be on the Google domain.
- If you have a lot of Circles and/or a lot of people in your various Circles views (e.g. “People in your circles”, “People who’ve added you”, etc.”), Mac users can use the pinch functionality to make the Circles section smaller so you can view all of your Circles.

- Hit Ctrl – (minus) on the Circles page and you’ll have a lot more screen real estate to work with. This was a huge help to me. Ctrl + (plus) to zoom everything back up to size.

COMMENTS
- You CAN remove comments on your posts, it’s just a 3 step process to do so.
- Are you having a conversation with someone who is in a lot of circles? If the comment’s in response to their own post, they’ll see it via their Notifications, so you can just respond.

But if the popular person added a comment to someone else’s posts, it’s likely they’re not paying attention to every post they commented on. (Once you have hundreds of followers, it becomes necessary to turn off some of the notifications before you get buried.) You can still continue the conversation, though; just +-mention them each time you respond to them. They’ll get a notification, and if they want to respond, they will.

HANGOUTS

- Use Google translate’s nifty “Listen” feature to communicate with people speaking other languages in Hangouts. http://translate.google.com/

- There’s currently no way to search for Hangouts and Googlers are saying they do this intentionally because having some sort of connection to the Hangout is important. To find Hangouts in your Circles. right now, the best way to do this is to hit the “Start a hangout” link and in the green room, if there are any live hangouts that have been announced to you, it’ll show there, and give you a way to jump over to them. if there aren’t any, you can close down the green room, and a Lonely Hangout post never appears on your stream if you’re self conscious about it.

- Chee Chew on “The Lonely Hangout”: Some folks are self-conscious about starting a Hangout. The first few minutes are twiddle-thumbs/sing-to-yourself minutes. Try this instead…

Mute your video and mute your audio when you first start. Make sure your speakers are on! Then just throw the hangout in the background as you do other stuff. When someone drops in, they’ll say hello. Then go unmute your audio/video.

It’s kinda like sitting on your front porch reading the paper or whatever. Just go about your business, but there for friends to stop by and say hello.

Since you’re muted, you don’t have to be self-conscious about saying something, or doing something that someone accidentally sees/hears. We also drop the big video, so it’s not consuming as much CPU or network bandwidth.

And if, in case, you decide to leave the hangout before anyone joins, we’ll remove the post from your stream so that folks don’t know you had a lonely hangout .

- Every hour in a Google Hangout you spend 720MB of bandwidth. So control your addiction if you have a limit on your consumption

INCOMING

- In your stream, “Incoming” means “other people who are sharing with me” — people who aren’t yet in your circles. You can browse through it to see people who have added you.

MOBILE APP

- The mobile app has two features of “surpassing awesomeness”: Huddles and Instant Upload. Huddles are everything that messaging was supposed to be but never was — group of people, persistent conversations so you can keep chatting with people, a hell of a lot faster delivery than SMS, etc. Instant upload means that you will never have photos stranded on your phone again.

- The G+ mobile app automatically puts all photos you take on your phone into a private album on Google +, where you can then decide whether or not you want to share them with any circles. Currently on available with an Android phone.

- Disable auto uploads from your mobile device if you are using the Google+ mobile app. – You don’t want your own personal Weinergate.

PHOTOS & VIDEOS

- Mousing over someone’s profile name spawns a popup layer that shows a bigger profile photo and let’s you add them to a circle without visiting their profile page

- On a picture page in the Gallery. “Actions” Button > “Edit photo” You’ll find several filters to use on your Picture

- Clicking a timestamp takes you to the permalinked post

- You can click on profile pictures to rotate through them.

- To ensure proper sharing of your photos, go to your photos page and choose “Your albums”. Then go to each album and update the visibility setting to the appropriate circles. Face tagging (and respective stream posts) respects these settings. (hat tip to Nathan Davis)

- If you tag somebody in a photo, you share the entire album with them. They can then tag anyone they want in that album, thereby sharing it with them too.

So there are two things to keep in mind here, unless/until this behavior is changed:

1) Make sure you are ok with sharing an entire album when you share a photo with someone – that is, you should probably organize your photos into groups that make sense when they’re seen together. Don’t just make an “All of my photos” album unless you’re comfortable with people seeing them.

2) There is no way to disable resharing of tagged photos /for the time being/.

One exception to this is your instant upload photos – when you tag or share one, that photo is essentially added to its own album, so it won’t magically share all of the photos from your phone when you share one.

SPARKS

- In addition to following people, you can search for interesting stuff to share about particular topics in the Sparks section on the side menu of the main page. Click Sparks, and search for things that you’re interested in or browse through the featured topics; if you want to pin a search on your sidebar for easy future access, click the Add Interest button under the search field.

- Random side note: While debugging the system, Google often used “Chocolate Cake” as a test interest. It turned out to be a really distracting interest.

| - In sparks, the pipe does an “or” search (haven’t been able to get this to work)

source : localseoguide(dot)com

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home