Communities is not showing for me (yet), but I have downloaded Snapseed on my Nexus 7. Pretty slick and easy to use though my use of it will be minimal since the Nexus 7 camera is not photography-friendly (though good enough for hangouts).
Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger
We have several things to announce today at Google+ that I'm incredibly excited about. The first one is Google+ Communities. A lot of people have been saying that sharing circles wasn't really what they wanted: they wanted a way to have a group of people that people could join, talk with, form a community with. Today we're starting to roll out that feature to all of our users. You can form communities ranging from completely public (anyone can join, anyone can see what's happening) to completely private (need approval to join, membership lists are kept secret, nothing leaks out of the community), so they're meant to serve a wide variety of needs. This product is still very much in Beta, so please try it out, see how it works, and give us feedback: we want to know what should improve!
The second is something for the photo world. Google recently acquired Nik Software, maker of both some very serious high-end photography software and some very neat cell phone software. Today we have an announcement on the cell phone front: Snapseed for Android is now available in the Play Store. Snapseed brings you some amazingly sophisticated filters and tools which are shockingly easy to use. It's a great deal of fun and I recommend you try it out. (There's already an iOS version for those of you with such devices)
And finally, we have some numbers to announce about the size of the Google+ community. As of today, Google+ has over half a billion users; 235 million active users, visiting some social aspect of Google; and 135 million people who are actively using the stream alone, visiting plus.google.com to read and share things with the people they know. It's been an amazing first year and a half, where we've gone from "I really hope this works…" to having the equivalent of the population of a major country showing up on a regular basis to talk with one another. We've started to really see Google+ shine as both a place to talk very privately – all of those conversations that you don't see, because they're between small groups of friends or family – and very publicly, sharing photos, long-form text, and so on. It's become a place where a lot of people can meet, and I've been lucky enough to make a great many friends through the service. And in the next year, I hope that we can make it even more so, with more features, more people, and more community among our many users.
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Google+: Communities and photos
For our international readers, this post is also available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Spanish (Spain, Latin America). – Ed. During the holidays we reconnect…
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