Google+ makes some new changes to “Hangouts”

PanARMENIAN.Net - It's 1 day before Facebook's developer conference and before Google announced two big news about its social network Google+ (G+).

Vic Gundotra, Google senior veep of Engineering, blogged about the new changes of “Hangouts” feature and also announced that now G+ is open for everyone to sign up, Betanews reports.

Before the Google+ mobile app didn't support hangouts, but now users with Android 2.3 and a device with a forward-facing camera can join hangouts on their mobile phone. Hangouts were limited to small groups of only 10 users, but with the new feature called "Hangouts On Air," users can start a normal hangout, accept up to 10 participants. No longer are hangouts limited to video chats or video chats over a YouTube video. Now, hangouts support screensharing, shared sketchpad, Google Docs collaboration, and hangout naming. Collectively, these features are called "Hangouts with Extras."

To join G+ users were sending “Join requests” to each other. Now being public is a big change for a social network, just three months old and already 20-million-plus subscribers strong. The real test of Google's infrastructure comes now then there's the question about how the service will demographically change.