Google+ lives on in Hangouts, Photos, Apple, YouTube, Android, Gmail

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — The Google+ social network is headed to the graveyard.

But let’s not bury it yet. Some very cool and useful tools came out of the Google+ experiment, which still live on.

This week, Google sort of threw in the towel to taking on Facebook with yet another place for folks to update each other on their lives, by making a major change in how we interact with Google.




No longer will we have to sign into our Google+ profile to get to YouTube: We can now use our regular Google ID.

Google had basically forced G+ on folks, whether they wanted it or not, and that created so much hostility that Google + never really took off. It’s a social network that resembled a digital ghost town.

And what’s the fun of posting if folks don’t respond, right?

So about those great Google + features?


Google Hangouts (Photo: Google)


Let’s start with Hangouts.

This is Google’s answer to Skype, a tool for video chats, with as many as 10 people at one time.

There are stickers, emojis and the other fun stuff you can grab to pretty up your chats, and you can broadcast them directly to YouTube.

More importantly, you can use Hangouts to make free phone calls, either via your computer or on your phone via the Hangout app for Apple and Android devices.

Hangouts works directly within the world’s most popular e-mail program, Gmail, for video chats, text chats and phone calls.

At work the other day, I signed into a conference call by making it directly from Gmail and talked into the laptop. It worked great.

I’ve visited Canada and used Hangouts to call my son at home without having to pay huge international fees.



Google Plus lives on w/Hangouts & Photos from USA TODAY TalkingTech


The other feature that lives on in a big way is Photos.

Originally, Google put a lot of effort into making photos beautiful on G+, hoping that the better display, tools like unlimited backup and superior editing features would wean folks away from Facebook, the No. 1 place for photo sharing online.

Photographers noticed, but the rest of the world didn’t follow them.


Google Photos (Photo: Google)


So in June, Google separated Google Photos from G+, into its own Android and iOS app, and website, photos.google.com.

If you haven’t downloaded the app yet, you need to. Google Photos makes an automatic backup of every photo you shoot on your smartphone, and lets you connect a hard drive to the app as well to make copies of photos taken on your camera. And it’s all free.

The deal with the devil however is that Google lowers the resolution of the photo, but they’re still usable for printing. And you've got another backup source, that won't take any effort to feed.

Beyond that Google Photos uses Google’s acclaimed search to find people, places and things in your photos. So when it works correctly, it can locate every image I shot from my recent trip to the Cascades of Oregon, or Santa Fe, N.M.

The app doesn’t always pull it off, but then again it’s free. Who am I going to complain to?

It's still fun to open the app every day and see how Google arranged my photos, and what silly animations and collages it's made from my photos. I rarely use them, but they usually make me smile