ClintonFitch.com

If you are one of the people that look at Google Plus, seeing all the changes and left scratching your head, you are not alone.  By a long shot. The little social network that could, which was aimed squarely at meeting Facebook head-on, has seemingly been not only revived from the brink of death earlier this year but actually thriving.  And even more importantly, Google seems to be paying attention to it.

I know, I was just as shocked.

For those who don’t use Google Plus or have not looked at it in a long time, let me give you a bit of background.  While never coming out fully and saying they were killing Google Plus, the Mountain View company left plenty of hints and suggestions that their attempt at being a social network was ending.  Bits and pieces of the service like Google Photos and profile integration were moved out of the service and even some of the single sign-on features were starting to disappear.  It seemed that Google had other interests in mind and had conceded the social network space to Facebook, Instagram and others.

But then a curious thing happened just last month.  Google with a reasonable amount of fan fair announced a completely revamped Google Plus experience was coming and, in fact, users could try it immediately.  The move was to focus the service on Communities, collections of fellow users with common interests around a subject (like Formula 1 for me as an example), and would be  tweaking and improving it over time.

Now why would you spend any amount of time, resources or money on something that is supposedly dead?  What you have to keep in mind though is that Google never said they were killing plus.  It was assumed by many blogs and tech writers based on other things the said.  That is where it went off the rails.

One of the big additions to the Google Now launcher and Android Marshmallow has been Now on Tap.  With this new feature, you can tap and hold the home button on your Android phone or tablet and get contextual information about what it is you are reviewing on your device.  The idea and first implementation was around Google Chrome so if you were viewing a website, you could get more granular information about that site.

The good news is that Google is expanding Now on Tap and it works in the Google Play Store app on your phone or tablet. If you are in the Play Store app and looking at an app, tap and hold your home button to pull up the Now on Tap information.  The context you get will vary from app-to-app.  For games I generally found that you would get links to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  On some developers I also got a link to the developer’s site to check out the app or others they may offer.

It was a long time coming but earlier this week the Google Photos team updated the app and service so you can share photo albums with others.  The idea is that if I share an album with you, you will be able to see the photos without having to be a user of the service or even an Android user.  It also gives you the ability to allow people you share with to add their photos to the album which are uploaded to your photos library.  When Google previewed this back in September, it was a feature that I personally had keen interest in seeing as I use Google Photos and Android while my wife is an iPhone user.  Now we can share albums of our events without having to do the USB stick drive swap.

To share an album in Google Photos for web, just open up the album you want to share and tap the Share icon in the upper right corner.  There you can select those you want to share it with anyone by getting a link to the album (so you could send it via email) but I can also share that album with Google+, Facebook and Twitter too.  You can also select if those you are sharing with can upload photos to the album.

Sharing on Google Photos for Android is just as easy.

Earlier this week Google released the Pixel C, their latest-and-greatest Android tablet, into the Google Store and now you can download the factory image of Android 6.0.1 for it.  The code name for the unit is Ryu and the latest build for the tablet is 6.0.1 (MXB48K).  Given that the Pixel C is a Wi-Fi only tablet, we likely won’t see a lot of variations on the factory images going forward which will make it easy for those who want to flash them to the device.

For those who aren’t familiar, factory images are full builds of Android for the various Google Nexus and Pixel devices.  Aimed mostly at the developer community, anyone can flash their device with the latest factory image if they want to regress to a previous version or want to always have the latest version of Android on their device without waiting for the carrier or Google to send out the over-the-air (OTA) update.  To use a factory image, your bootloader must be unlocked and you can find the full instructions on the Factory Images site.