Its been two years since Google Plus was launched as a competitor to Facebook and while it may not match Facebook's user base, it has become a big part of Google's ecosystem.Today it is getting a huge update with brings a new user interface with 41 new features in three categories: stream, hangouts and photos.
Stream
The updated stream adds support for multiple columns which comes with new animations and slide in menus. The interface is clearly influenced by Google Now and is a pleasure to use. The Google+ stream is capable of resizing itself to fit multiple display sizes, so the bigger devices can better enjoy their content spanned across the three columns.
Google will analyse the posts and automatically add hashtags. These hashtags will allow you to find related content to the posts and browse through the content. For example if you have posted a photo with the Eiffel tower, Google will automatically identify the image even without a description and tag it for you. If you don't want your posts tagged, removing them is just as easy.
Hangouts
Hangouts has now become a cross platform universal messaging application and is available to download for Chrome, Android and iOS.
Conversations are live and you can see your friends as they join a conversation or start typing. The conversations are even synced across multiple devices, so you can pick up a conversation you started on your phone on your tablet or Chrome web browser.
Adding a friend to your conversation is also very easy and you start conversations with your Circles with a simple push of the button.
Photos
Photos on Google+ also have been enhanced. The updates focus on four key areas - backup, highlight, enhance and awesome. The update aims to save the time thats generally consumed by editing and organizing your content.
With the update you can now save full resolution photos in the 5 GB of free space. Google plans to up the free quota to 15GB very soon giving users even more space for their photos.
Google will study your photos and sort blurry images, duplicates, badly exposed images and landmarks and select the best of your content as Highlights.
Google has also introduced new tools that can fix images to correct noise or bad exposures and it is all done automatically.
Last but not least, Google will scan through all your photos and add the auto-awesome feature and you may find an animated photo courtesy of Google if you have a sequence of photos stored in Google+
Have you checked out these new features in Google+ yet? If not you may want to head over to your Google+ account right now and check it out.