Google have extended their content offering by launching a much-rumoured Flipboard competitor, Google Currents. It’s a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones, that lets you explore online magazines, blogs and news sites through a clean, touch-friendly interface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOcUkm8m9w

Google have worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, The Guardian, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Popular Science and more. Content has been optimised specifically for smartphones and tablets, allowing users to navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline. more…

Following the release of Google’s new social feature, we have added Google+1 buttons to all BMJ and specialist journal articles.  If you’re unfamiliar with this functionality, it is basically a button similar to the Facebook “like”. When you click +1, you’re publicly recommending pages across the web. You can also use +1 to share with the right circles on Google+ (see more on this below).  +1’s can help improve Google Search too, since you can see which pages your social connections have +1’d beneath search results and ads.

Where is it found?
The Google+1 button on our journals can be found in the social bookmarking section of the navigation bar at the side of every article (see screenshot to the left). When you do a Google search you will also see the little +1 button next to each search result. You can then click this button to recommend search listings that you found useful. more…

Google is taking yet another stab at social networking with Google+ after the past disappointments of Buzz and Wave. This time, however, they have launched a more polished product than usual and offer a solution to the problem of keeping one’s personal and work life separate. The interface and concepts are cleaner and simpler, which will make it easier for early adopters to engage, use and then share their experiences.

In its blog post to introduce Google+, Google’s Vic Gundotra said the following:

“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

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Google started rolling out the ‘+1’ recommend button across its own portfolio and third-party web sites just a day after Twitter unveiled its new ‘follow’ button. Both releases are being viewed as direct competitors to Facebook’s popular ‘like’ button.

Central to an effort by companies to stake out their claim in the social-networking domain and encourage ordinary ‘surfers’ to be more engaged with their products, the tools also facilitate the collection of detailed user behaviour data and have obvious benefits for online advertising. The suite of Web 2.0 buttons featured on most websites has grown steadily over the past few years (you may well have noticed) and sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are long-term residents. But the success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has spurred others to get in on the game. Afterall, it is said to appear on more than a third of the 1,000 most popular websites and apparently the average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic. more…