Google+: new features for the 100 million "active" users

March 14th, 2012 - 04:10 pm ET by J. G.

A reorganisation in the photo albums and the integration of Google Docs into video bubbles are two of the new features that Google+’s 100 million active users now have available to them.

The young Google+ continues to see improvements. The latest announcements relate to photo albums with the appearance of a new option: organise the album. This latest feature allows you to sort an album by date, move photos by dragging and dropping them into a specific order (two buttons allow you to place the photos in the first or last position), move the photos to a new album and delete multiple selected photos all at once.

Another new feature for Google+ is the integration of Google Docs into hangouts (video chat). This possibility was until now only available through the Extras, but it is now available to all users.

A Google Documents button is displayed in the video chat. The user can create a new document or import one. The document will be added to a list on the left hand panel with this making collaborative work easier.

A ghost town?
Figures recently released by comScore indicate that US internet users only spend 3.3 minutes each month on Google+. The Wall Street Journal has therefore qualified Google+ as a "ghost town" compared to Facebook where the average user spends 405 minutes peach month.

Vice-president of engineering at Google, Vic Gundotra rebuffed this statistic. This false impression comes from, according to him, the fact that most Google+ users share their content with private contacts and circles, which gives the impression that there is no activity. This highlights the leading circles function which controls users sharing of information.

Vic Gundotra stated to Bloomberg that Google+ today has 100 million active users with 50 million visiting every day. This growth is deemed exceptional. For Google+, talk of Google 2.0 and great improvements which will be made available to all services through their unification plan so that the company can better understand their users.