Jul 6 2011

Google+ – What’s It All About?

So last week Google launched their latest product/service/short-term-social-fix. If you don’t know, it’s called Google+. Still on a limited trial, Google are letting a trickle of users in at a time after the ‘first wave’ were allowed last Thursday.

Essentially it gives you FULL control of your news feed and how public everything you share actually is. You create Circles of friends or people you wish to follow. Your friends can be in multiple Circles and you limit what each Circle has access to. You are the only person who can see your Circles. Your friends can see who is in your Circles but not which or what they are called.

Still with me? Good.

To take the privacy and limitations a step further, you can now edit each part of your profile page to allow different Circles, different levels of access. So your phone number can be shared with just your real life friends, or your job title hidden from the public. Whilst editing, you can view your profile through the eyes of a friend. Test the settings to make sure your access limitations are set just right!

Now for the fun stuff. Hangouts are awesome. I’ve been lost in several hangouts for hours on end. Strike up a hangout and you share that with your Circles. Anyone can join in and so the fun begins!

A clever thing Hangouts does, is switch the ‘camera’ from person to person as they’re talking. So you can follow the conversation naturally without any effort. If you want, you can select a friend and their camera will stay onscreen. But click again and autopilot kicks in!

If someone wants to share a YouTube video, they can and everyone else starts watching. Mic’s are muted and you have to click+hold a button to talk over the video. If someone pauses it, it pauses for everyone so you can comment on what just happened.

There’s also chat and you can share links and photos and all the usual stuff but this is first wave. Imagine what’s gonna happen as soon as you can automatically spunk things into Google+…

What will happen? Will it get better? Will it ride the Wave or catch a Buzz?

Jul 3 2011

Android Reboots – Can’t Install ANYTHING

In addition to my trusty iPhone I do actually own a HTC Desire and occasionally, I like to use Android to have a play and see what’s happening on the other side of the fence. There are times that it works without a hitch (like playing with Google+ over the last few days) but I think a botched ‘root’ attempt has left my phone in a bit of a sorry state.

So here’s the current problem. I have an Android System Update available to install… Each time I try to install, the phone reboots and starts up in ‘ClockworkMod Recovery Mode’ and when I go to install the update, I get the same error messages!

ClockworkMod Recovery

Here’s the error I get -

Error

E:Can’t find MISC:
E:Can’t mount CACHE:recovery/command
E:Can’t find MISC:
E:Can’t mount CACHE:recovery/log
E:Can’t find MISC:

So here’s the question… What do I do? I’m posing this question to my fellow Googlers first off. Hoping that the experience in my Circles will find how to fix this. Don’t forget to share with your Circles to see if Google+ can come up with the answer…!

Jun 17 2011

Google Images – Search By Image!

Wow. I’ve just found something pretty cool on Google and I wanted to share it.

Notice anything different about Google Images…? See in the search box… There’s a camera to the right and if you click it, you get some all new search options.

Now you can paste the URL of a photo/image you would like to search for, or you can opt to upload an image and use that to search for similar images.

I tried a couple of different photos that were sat in my Pictures folder. One was a photo of me looking silly and another, the photo of ‘Me, Myself & I‘ that I created.

There were some interesting results, the photo just did as I expected and found VERY similar photos. I think one or two were probably wearing the same shirt as me! The next set of results first found web pages that had that EXACT image, then some similar images below. Take a look here -