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Social Media Vocabulary: Google+ Edition

If you have been wandering aimlessly around Google Plus wondering what all these oddly named things are, that’s good because today’s social media vocabulary is here to help out. Here are 5 Google Plus related vocab words to get familiar with!

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  1. Circles: The first thing you will notice when you start with Google+ are the circles. These are Google’s way of helping you sort your friends. They believe that “You share different things with different people. [and] sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle.”
  2. Huddle: If you have the Google+ app on your phone, this allows for easy group messaging with your contacts. Chat a while circle at once and get everybody linked up so you can have more fun together and spend less time trying to coordinate.
  3. Sparks: Google uses the analogy of your Grandpa clipping newspaper articles he thinks you would be interested in. Sparks is a tool within Google+ that tries to show you articles and media you might like. You can subscribe to different genres of interest in Sparks and then Google fine tunes your results as you go.
  4. Hangouts: Hassle free video chats! Hangouts makes it easy to video chat with another person or a group right from within Google +. Google wants it to be the place for unplanned online meet-ups to happen, something like a controlled chat roulette with only your friends.
  5. +1’s: Essentially the Google+ version of the Facebook ‘Like’. Links that are strongly +1’nd in your network will rise in Google search results and earn a higher search rank the world over. This is the connection of social to search as well as social to pages and content out there on the web. +1’s will be a major player in determining search rank as Google+ grows.