Given that the company now offers a wider range of deals in these cities, it will also allow its users there to take its personalization quiz. This ensures that those who can't get enough deals on massages can continue to get those offers and those who prefer not to get yet another offer for an aromatherapy session can make sure they get other offers instead.

Google is clearly positioning Google Offers as more of a platform for third-party services and using its personalization service as a way to increase the conversion rates for these deals. The service is currently available in 38 cities and chances are that Google will continue to add more cities to its deal aggregation service over time.

Update: Reading over Google's numbers again, I don't think they actually mean that 60% of Google+ users engage with the service daily. Here is my follow-up.

In comparison, Facebook, which has about 800 million users, says 50% of its users come back every day.

Those numbers are surely also driven by the fact that any Google user who signs in to any of the company's services sees those large red numbers with new notifications in the black navigation bar.

In addition, Gundotra also noted that there are now over 1 million business pages on Google+.

Google, of course, isn't resting on its laurels. The Google+ has, according to Gundotra, shipped one new feature every single day since the launch of the service.

According to Google engineer Shana Gitnick, this feature is meant to make "video a bit more fun." All you have to do to get started is to authorize the Flash plugin to access your webcam and you're good to go. There are no editing features as of now, though. It's also not clear how long these videos are allowed to be. The 

The Very Short History of Video Status Update Services

Video-based status update services are nothing new, of course, and Facebook, too, lets you record updates right from your webcam. Seesmic, in its first incarnation, was fully focused on video status updates before it pivoted. Others, including 12seconds.tv, for example, also didn't survive for long.

The reason for this? Even today, though, most people don't feel fully comfortable in front of a camera (as Seesmic, for example, quickly realized before it pivoted). Because of this, I assume that this will remain a niche feature for the time being.

The latest beta version of Chrome now features pre-rendering of some web pages while you type the URL, for example. As Hoelzle rightly notes, all of Google's efforts won't matter much, after all, if you are taken right back into the "slow lane" when you click on a link on a search results page.

Google's final goal, according to Hoelzle: "We don’t plan on stopping until the web is instant, so that when you click on a link the site loads immediately, and when you play a video it starts without delay."

Last year, the "Bed Intruder Song" took the top billing in YouTube's annual top 10 list. This year, it was Rebecca Black's "Friday." While there wasn't a single cat video in last year's top 10, this year saw two of them make the list ("Nyan Cat" and "cat mom hugs baby kitten"). Sadly, my favorite cat video of the year didn't make the list, though.

Here is the complete top 10:

It’s important to note that these social signals from your friends don’t currently influence the main news section on Google News. There, Google’s news algorithms provide the personalization features based on your web history and which articles you click on.

Google is only making baby steps toward social recommendations here, though. As Google software engineer Erich Schmidt points out, the Spotlight section will only “sometimes” features stories that were +1’d by your friends or people in your circles.

I gather this is just a way for Google to test its social recommendation algorithms for Google News, though, and that we will soon see more of this kind of personalization across the service. With Google+, after all,  the company now has its own data source for social recommendations.

Google launched a limited beta of its music services at its annual developer conference Google IO earlier this year. There was no music-matching, similar to what Apple is doing with iTunes Match, though, and no music store, as Google wasn’t able to secure licenses from the major music industry players. Because of this, users had to upload their own songs to the service, which could often take hours or days for large music libraries.

At Google IO, the company’s executives stressed that they had really wanted to open the service with support from the music industry, Google found their demands “unreasonable and unsustainable.” Clearly, the relationship between Google and the labels has changed now.

Indeed, Google managed to get a number of exclusives from the Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Busta Ryhmes and others.

As Jamie Rosenberg, Google’s director of digital content for Android noted during the event, consumers now expect that their music services are connected to the cloud and available on all devices instantly. 

On Google Music, all songs will be encoded at 320kbps. Users can buy songs from their Android devices and from the web. The music store required Android 2.2 or higher. The new versions of the Google Music app will be available in the next few days.

T-Mobile users will get carrier billing for music purchases in the near future.

Sharing

Google is also putting a strong emphasis on sharing songs. Users can tell their friends that they have bought a song on Google+, but more importantly, your friends will also get one free stream of the song or album as well.

An Artist Hub for Independent Musicians

Google is also working with independent musicians and will make it easier for them to set up their own shops on Google Music. They will be able to create an artist page for a one-time $25 fee, upload their own songs and set their own prices.

The growth in traffic over the last week is likely due to the launch of the Google+ Pages for brands and publishers. This clearly drove renewed interest in the service. Maybe even more importantly, though, Hitwise also found that Google+ users are now sticking around, as the number of returning visitors increased by 18% in the first two weeks of November compared to the same timeframe in October. Indeed, Hitwise found that almost three quarters (74%) of all traffic to Google+ came from returning visitors.

Hitwise also found that Google+ profits greatly from being promoted on other Google properties. Gmail and YouTube, for example, account for 16% and 5.5% of all referral traffic to the site, while Google itself accounts for a bit more than 45.5%.

That’s Not What a Dying Service Looks Like

Ever since its launch, the Google+ team had to deal with numerous reports that traffic to the site was slowing down and that the service was basically dead already (something I never saw on my own stream, which seems to be active 24×7 and which gets more reactions than anything I post on Twitter). While Google would probably like to see a faster influx of new users to the service, this new data from Hitwise clearly shows that things are actually looking up for Google+ right now.

Live@edu is actually currently in the process of transitioning to becoming Office 365 for Education to keep it on par with Microsoft’s other cloud-based productivity offerings. Office 365 for Education includes support for all the regular Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), as well as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online. Microsoft also stressed that school can use its tools to do more than just manage documents and email online. With Lync, Office 365 for Education also includes tools for holding virtual classes and online meetings, for example.

Microsoft offers 5 different plans that schools can offer their students, ranging from basic free accounts for students and school, to more fully-featured suites that start at $6/month.

Update: Looks like somebody at Google posted this update before it was supposed to go live. The original post has now been taken down. I’ve copied it at the bottom of this post.

For now, this new API will be read-only, which means developers can get data out of Google+, but they won’t be able to send photos there themselves. Access, of course, is limited to public albums, photos and videos. Google will also support Creative Commons licensing and this information will be exposed in the API, so that developers can make sure that they respect the copyright information the photographers on Google+ have set for their images.

Developers will be able to get access to a user’s album lists, a list of all photos and the individual photos themselves, of course. The methods for accessing videos are virtually the same.

What does this mean for users? Soon, you will be able to see images in third-party clients that support Google+. Developers can now also import your Google+ photos into their apps, if they choose to do so. Or, as Google’s Yangzhu Li points out in the announcement today, somebody can now create a Google+ screen saver to “crowdsource great images, or a live photo wall for a party.”

Here is the full post:

Bring your apps to Life with Photos and Videos from Google+

Photo sharing is one of my favorite features of Google+. As a new dad, it’s been a joy to take photos of my baby girl and share them just moments later! 

Beyond baby photos, Google+ hosts all sorts of photographs — and all sorts of photographers. Many talented pros have found a home sharing and publishing their work in Google+, such as Trey Ratcliff, Thomas Hawk, and Colby Brown. Today, we’re making it easier to leverage the power of personal and professional images by releasing our first Google+ API for photos and videos.

Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights.

Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. Combined with our existing public data and search APIs, I’m hoping to see new services such as a family-focused ‘screen saver’, a new way to crowdsource great images, or a live photo wall for a party.

You can start experimenting by listing users’ public albums with the albums.list method. If you already know an album id, you can directly fetch it with the albums.get method. You can list all photos from an album with the photos.listByAlbum method, or fetch any individual photo with the photos.get method:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/photos/{photoId}?key=[yourAppKey]

which returns:

{
“kind”: “plus#photo”,
“id”: “_iZQhpeOJlWzCqLggyWXsO4-Af160osO”,
“published”: “2011-10-16T23:59:36.000Z”,
“updated”: “2011-11-05T08:29:28.000Z”,
“displayName”: “DSC_5575.JPG”,
“summary”: “”,
“author”: {
“id”: “103168604032363426774″,
“displayName”: “Yongzhu Li”,
“url”: “https://plus.google.com/103168604032363426774“,
“image”: {
“url”: “https://googleusercontent.com/…/photo.jpg?sz=50”
}

   },
“url”: “https://plus.google.com/photos/…“,
“thumbnail”: {
“url”: “https://googleusercontent.com/…/s64/DSC_5575.JPG“,
“type”: “image/jpeg”,
“height”: 64,
“width”: 43
},

   “image”: {
“url”: “https://googleusercontent.com/…/s1600/DSC_5575.JPG“,
“type”: “image/jpeg”,
“height”: 1600,
“width”: 1071
},

   “album”: {
“id”: “CTWbarJIotAZBfJLEeUxDe4-Af160osO”
},

   “creativeCommonsLicense”: {
“term”: “Some rights reserved.”,
“allowReuse”: true,
“allowCommercialReuse”: false,
“allowRemixing”: false
}
}

 Prefer videos? A quick hop over to the API reference manual explains how to use the similar methods videos.listByAlbum and videos.get. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback during our next Google+ platform office hours, helping you build your first photo-powered Google+ app on our Discussion Board, and continuing the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Yongzhu Li, Google+ Software Engineer