Google+ Completely Redesigned: Includes Auto Hashtags, Multi Column Cards And Enhanced Photo Tools

Google have big plans for Google+, Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra announced that Google has completely redesigned the social networking service at I/O 2013. This includes a newly designed stream, new Hangouts, and a new photo experience. The search giant incorporates 3 column-grid for cards for Google Stream. Also high-resolution photos and videos fill the entire width of the stream, making it more visually appealing and easier to scan.

The redesign also includes some crafty animations like the bouncing sharebox, sliding menus, card flips and fade. The flipping cards are particularly cool - on clicking cards, they flip over to reveal comments.

Advanced Hashtag Features

Google+ now makes better use of the hashtag feature by adding it to the stream. Google + will now automatically tag posts based on the topic and also scans the the network for relevant conversations based on tags. Now you can click on the tags and flip cards to browse through related content.

Google adds hangout - unified messaging service into the redesign into Google+. Hangout messenger app combines text, photos and live video and will made available across Android, iOS and PC. The stand-alone app will be incorporated into Gmail as well.

Google also add new features and tools to make Pictures more rich and more compelling.

Auto Enhance: Google+ can automatically enhance you pictures by adding adjustments to the brightness, contrast, saturation, structure, noise, focus and other factors. It's as simple uploading a photo, open the lightbox and there you go, Google takes care of the rest.

Auto Awesome: Google will be able to detect the kind of photos you take and can create a new image based on the sequence of images added in the library. It can do things like animate a sequence of photos with a GIF image or make a panoramic image out of multiple portraits.

Auto Highlight: Auto Highlight helps you find your favourites faster by de-emphasizing duplicates, blurry images and poor exposures and focusing on pictures that are good. Highlights will be readily available on photos page.

Auto Backup: This feature allows users to automatically transfer pics to cloud storage (15 GB), after snapping them on a mobile phone. Nice way to save some space on the phone, ain't it.

The redesigned Google+ started rolling out on 16 May and will be rolled out over the next week.