-At this year's Google I/O, Google made some major changes to its Google Plus social network.
I'm Dan Farber from CNET, and I'm joined by our Google correspondent, Seth Rosenblatt.
Seth, so there's some big things going on with Google Plus,--
-Absolutely.
-competing with Facebook.
-Absolutely.
There's actually 3 big changes to the network.
We'll go over the 2 smaller ones first.
You'll notice that Google has a new layout for Google Plus.
It's more of a-- It's sort of-- it's Pinterest
via cards.
Google now has--
-So, let's get into it.
So Pinterest means lots of pictures, lots of captions--
-Lots of pictures.
It means you have the--
-And cards means, you know, lots of data that can be brought out--
-Absolutely.
-[unk] that can be brought out.
-So the big change really out of all three is what they've done to photos.
You now can upload your vacation photos, for example, and Google will do a number of things to them that they think you want them to do.
This includes getting rid of bad photos, photos that are out of focus, photos that are over-exposed, under-exposed,
photos that don't really seem to be of anything in particular.
-It just flags them out.
It doesn't just dump them into the trash.
-No, it doesn't delete them, but it filters them out.
At the same time, it filters in photos that it thinks you care about.
For example, if you tag a woman in your photo as your wife with her name, the next time you search for that name, it will find other photos that look like her.
It will also flag things like mountains and sunsets and beaches.
So, if you go on a vacation
to Thailand, and you type in Thailand beach, it will be able, without you doing anything, to simply pull out all the photos that are Thailand and beach.
-From your photo stream or from the--
-From your photo-
-or public from your--
-extra photo stream.
-But also, I would assume from a public photo stream as well.
-I would be.
I would assume that too.
-And was that-- is that using some of the technology from the Knowledge Graph, which it--
-Absolutely.
-where it knows about lots of entities, like 500 million entities--
-Absolutely.
-and all the connections between those entities.
-Yes.
So we are seeing, behind the scenes, sort of a
tightening of the strings of Google's knowledgebase.
The various things that it's doing are becoming more integrated with each other.
This is something that we saw with Google Plus over the past year as Gmail was brought in and Google Drive was brought in.
So these things are really becoming components of the same whole as opposed to discrete services.
-And you'll get your 15 gigabytes for free.
-Yes, and they've just announced on Monday that you now have 15 gigabytes that you can use across Gmail, across Google Drive, across Google Plus for your photos.
-How do you think this is gonna play out?
Photos is a huge part of what Facebook does--
-Absolutely.
-and Instagram, which is also part of Facebook, so is this a Google's attempt to really make its photos much more competitive than what's out there?
-Oh, without a doubt.
One of the interesting things that the new photo features can do is automatically stitch together panoramas.
It can tell when photos look like they have a scene between them and so it can stitch those together.
There's also the ability to do automatic
giving.
Those short little animated gifts.
This can now do that automatically, which is really quite incredible.
-Well, thanks for all of that insight.
-Thank you, Dan.
-For CNET, I'm Dan Farber.
Thanks for watching.
