Google held a press event for its Google+ social network yesterday, announcing user milestones and some new features. The milestones: Google+ now has 540m people actively interacting with it every month, although that’s across all Google services including YouTube. In terms of Google+ itself, the service has 300m monthly active ‘in-stream’ users. That compares to 135m active in-stream users in December 2012 (Bulletin, 7-Dec-12), and for a competitive comparison, Facebook currently reports 1.15bn active users, while Twitter has 218m. The growth may be one reason for artists and labels to use Google+, but another is the continued improvement of its Hangouts feature for live video chat and streams. That was one of the focal points for new features yesterday: Google+ users can now schedule live Hangouts On Air and promote them with a dedicated watch page, with a Control Room feature to moderate the conversation around it. Hangouts will now also be full-screen across mobile and desktop devices.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…