Google+ Updates: Real-Time Search, Hashtags and YouTube

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Yesterday, Google released a video featuring its Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, announcing that Google+ is going to be getting big updates in both real-time search and hashtag support.

The company's social network, which thus far hasn't exactly found mainstream success, will now feature search results that update instantly (the service just got its own search capabilities last month) and hashtags that are clickable. These clickable tags will then take users to search results for the terms.

"We're trying to make it easier to follow and contribute to live events on Google+," says Gundotra, "Including breaking news, sporting events and many others."

When it comes to search, relevance and punctuality are what drive this new update; now that Google has a unique pool of crowd-created information, it can produce real-time results. In fact, G+ posts have already started being integrated into Web search results. (Maybe that's bad timing after employee Steve Yegge's harsh critique of the social network on Google+ yesterday.)

In other G+ news, Google has made it possible for users to link their YouTube accounts with their Google+ profiles. Now videos shared with you on the social network will be added directly to your YouTube homepage.

Linking the two profiles is a matter of going to the "Sharing" tab in your YouTube account settings; there will be a link prompting you to "manage all your Google connected accounts" and from there you can join the two.

This isn't the first time that Google has incorporated G+ into one of their many other services (or even with YouTube, which has already had Hangouts integration), but it is probably the biggest merger since Plus accounts were linked to Google Docs.

Twitter Hashtag for Local Events

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Twitter, despite my ongoing cynicism, shows no signs of slowing down and don't think for a moment that technology vendors and Internet professionals haven't taken notice.

Eventful, a digital service which connects consumers with entertainment and live events,, today announced the launch of a standard hashtag index for local events. This will enable users of Twitter to have a common reference points when interacting (sending and reading messages) on the micro-blogging service.

Hashtags for individual events can be found on each event detail page. Eventful announced that in the future users will be able to add their own hashtag suggestions for any event to the index. Most importantly though, third-party developers will be able to access the hashtag index through Eventful's popular API.

“Eventful’s event hashtag index solves an important challenge that Twitter users face, which is selecting the appropriate hashtag to use when tweeting about local events so that others can find and share in the conversation,” said Eventful CEO Jordan Glazier. “Eventful provides the most comprehensive, definitive selection of local event content throughout the world, and it’s a natural extension of our social media platform to help people communicate about events across Twitter before, during and after they occur.”

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'Net Features : hashtag

Google+ Updates: Real-Time Search, Hashtags and YouTube

Twitter Hashtag for Local Events