Nice to see a groups-like feature make it to Google+ at last.
One of the best features of G+ has always been communicating with people you don't know in person, and I think this will facilitate that more around common interests. I can also see this as being useful for groups of friends or family who always want to post content to each other.
I don't know if Google announced this earlier, but this post just released more granular active (I assume monthly) user numbers for G+ than I've seen:
"More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search...), and 135 million are active in just the stream."
I thought it was very odd that Google inserted this paragraph in the beginning of a feature announcement blog post. I think it only reaffirms the inferiority complex of G+ by explicitly explaining that they are indeed a vibrant community.
Inferiority complex? Seems like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If they didn't, would you claim they didn't release numbers because they feel they have fewer users?
I don't think they're trying to imply anything. What's wrong with just giving you some numbers without any motivation behind it?
Early warning: I recently learned that some kids under 13 are adopting Google+. They all have gmail accounts, but their parents won't let them go on Facebook.
It's not really any different in terms of legality or functions, but parents understand (and often don't like) Facebook. So, most likely without the parents' knowledge, their kids are meeting up via Google+.
I am not sure if I'm following. These Communities appear to be as same as Pages with a +Name in the URL. I thought they released the feature of Pages and the + Name a while ago. So what makes Community different?
The problem with this I feel and one of the advantages of Twitter is that if a certain company controls their community page (e.g. Audi USA) and I go to post some sort of customer service complaint, they have the option of removing it. With Twitter, I can just add a hashtag or @message them and it'd be visible globally with search.
wait, so what prevents you from +mentioning someone or #tagging a post in G+? Communities are completely independent and orthogonal to those already existing features
Did I really want this generations monopoly in on my social data as well?
If Search== Windows
and
Apps == Office
do I really want Google having access to my social data too?
A healthy skeptic, getting more and more paranoid....
I like Google but I'm starting to have similar concerns. Google could possibly become dominant search, mobile, social, browsers and more. I'm not afraid (yet) that Google will abuse their power but that kind of monopoly would be unhealthy...
Maybe the fact the Google knows what my friends search for and email each other about means they know more about me than I'm comfortable with them knowing.
Checking it out, I don't see anything in the app that seems to be dependent on 4.0+ features, though obviously things are easier if you can use the latest and greatest APIs.
I'm guessing that it was more of a support issue. Switching to 4.0+ drops the number of devices you have to support dramatically, and with that the headache of all of the obscure device users giving you 1 stars and angry emails.
The team I'm on is transitioning from 2.3+ to 4.0+ support for some technical reasons, but easier development and support is a huge bonus.
When you say nothing do you mean nothing special, or do you mean that you can't access G+ at all from google apps? Because on both of my apps accounts, google+ works just fine.
I'm okay with that personally. The thing that bugs me is that it doesn't support multi-accounts yet. At work we use Google Apps, which I have signed in simultaneously with my personal Google account. I can pop between my personal and company GMails easily.
Whenever I click on a G+ link it insists on using my company account, telling me I can't get Google+, etc etc. There's no way to switch over to my personal account to actually use it :(
Could you elaborate on that a little? I have two Google accounts, both on different Apps domains, and I have no trouble using multilogin support with G+ on either.
To help debug:
1. Does multilogin support work at all for you? In other words, can you open both accounts' GMail in side-by-side tabs in the same browser? (The URL should contain something like "/a/something.com" or "/u/0" in each one.)
2. In the first of these tabs, if you click the +You link in the upper left corner, does it take you to G+?
In a browsing session, the Google account you sign in to first will be the default account used by Google.
For Plus, the link for using your second session (as given in the Switch Account menu in the top right) is https://plus.google.com/?authuser=1 . You should also be able to use https://plus.google.com/u/1/ , which is the link used in the top-of-page nav menu on google.com after switching to your second session.
One temporary/hacky multiple account solution is to use multiple Chrome profiles (I think Firefox also has something similar). This way I have separate work and personal Gmails working smoothly, and using different themes for the profiles also means that I don't mistake the windows and send out something from the wrong email account.
I don't think this is a hacky solution so much as a great solution. Chrome profiles are a very convenient feature because they can add multi-login support to anything, not just Google sites.
I have exactly the same problem. My half-baked solution is to use my Google+ account in my secondary browser (e.g. Safari) and use the Google Apps accounts in the other one. It's not perfect and it's frankly the reason why I don't check into G+ that often.
One of the best features of G+ has always been communicating with people you don't know in person, and I think this will facilitate that more around common interests. I can also see this as being useful for groups of friends or family who always want to post content to each other.