Terasem hangouts

Terasem joiners and friends meet on the 10th of each month, and remote participants can join via Google+ Hangouts. In the picture, the participants in Florida (shown, Martine Rothblatt performing a yoga session), Dan Massey and Alison Gardner from DC, myself from Europe, and a visitor.

These meetings will become even more interesting as the new Extra features in Google+ Hangouts, which combine multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, are rolled in Hangouts. ReadWriteWeb says: "Hangouts allow users to bring in Google Docs, and smartphone users can use mobile video chat to participate. The addition of screen sharing makes Hangouts a versatile, compelling, free way to conduct remote meetings".

The limit of 10 participants is annoying, but there are interesting news: Hangouts on-air will permit broadcasting hangouts to viewers. Read How Google+ Hangouts will transform traditional TV broadcasting on lostremote.

Google+ Hangouts with extras combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs

Last year after Google I/O 2010 I wrote "the most interesting development to watch, still a rumor, is Google Meetings: a multiuser videoconferencing application for the Google cloud. If Google Meetings is integrated with the other applications in the Google Apps suite, it could very rapidly become the favorite solution for desktop business videoconferencing and collaboration."

That was before Google+. The new Google+ Hangouts with Extras feature, recently announced, does just that: "Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can't be in the same room. Whether you’re out of town, working on a project with a distributed group, or just don’t feel like walking to the next building for your meeting, Hangouts with extras can give your team the productivity boost it needs." Awesome.

Google+: First impressions and thoughts

I have been one of the lucky few to receive an invitation to Google+ on the first day it went public as a beta field test, and I have been playing with it a lot. Google+ is Google's new social network, very similar to Facebook with extra features similar to Twitter and Diaspora. Google+ is already interoperable with other Google services, e.g. Profiles and Picasa. In time, it may be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the Google ecosystem (Gmail, Groups, Docs, Calendar, Blogger, Maps, Latitude, Youtube, Apps...) and become something huge.

I have written a review of "Google+: First impressions and thoughts" on the Space Collective site. Excerpt: "I think selective sharing is both a strong and weak point. It is strong, because you can share a post with your friends without sharing it with your mother and your boss. It is weak, because sharing with everyone is simpler than categorizing your contacts in circles, and things must be made really very simple in these KISS days. Most of my own posts are shared with all my circles like on Facebook and also public (shared with everyone who chooses to follow me like on Twitter), but I can certainly see the advantages of selective sharing. Especially for young people who can now have different Family, Friends, School and Work circles, but strangely I think most young people may stay on Facebook and ignore Google+, leaving the latter to us grown-ups. Also, perhaps only persons with some degree of computer literacy will use Google+ frequently: if Wave is for computer geeks only, and Facebook is for everyone including your granddaughter and grandfather, Google+ may occupy the mid ground."

Read the rest on Space collective...