Millions of people use Google+ to connect around the things they’re interested in. To help you sort through the many Collections and Communities where people share, we’ve created a new feature called Topics. With Topics, you’ll see a high-quality stream of Collections, Communities and people related to things we think you’ll be interested in.
See recommended Topics in your Home stream and discover Collections, Communities and people related to the Topics you're interested in
Today, there are already hundreds of Topics available in English, Spanish and Portuguese, covering everything from black-and-white photography to hiking and camping. So whether you’ve recently discovered the wonders of woodworking, love gardening, or can’t get enough street photography, there’s a stream of unique and interesting stuff waiting for you on Google+.
To see the recommended Topics, head to your home stream and look for the “Topics to explore” cards. Topics will be rolling out over the next day or so, so don’t worry if you don’t see any suggestions right away.
Millions of people use Google+ to connect around the things they’re interested in. To help you sort through the many Collections and Communities where people share, we’ve created a new feature called Topics. With Topics, you’ll see a high-quality stream of Collections, Communities and people related to things we think you’ll be interested in.
See recommended Topics in your Home stream and discover Collections, Communities and people related to the Topics you're interested in
Today, there are already hundreds of Topics available in English, Spanish and Portuguese, covering everything from black-and-white photography to hiking and camping. So whether you’ve recently discovered the wonders of woodworking, love gardening, or can’t get enough street photography, there’s a stream of unique and interesting stuff waiting for you on Google+.
To see the recommended Topics, head to your home stream and look for the “Topics to explore” cards. Topics will be rolling out over the next day or so, so don’t worry if you don’t see any suggestions right away.
Millions of people use Google+ to connect around the things they’re interested in. To help you sort through the many Collections and Communities where people share, we’ve created a new feature called Topics. With Topics, you’ll see a high-quality stream of Collections, Communities and people related to things we think you’ll be interested in.
See recommended Topics in your Home stream and discover Collections, Communities and people related to the Topics you're interested in
Today, there are already hundreds of Topics available in English, Spanish and Portuguese, covering everything from black-and-white photography to hiking and camping. So whether you’ve recently discovered the wonders of woodworking, love gardening, or can’t get enough street photography, there’s a stream of unique and interesting stuff waiting for you on Google+.
To see the recommended Topics, head to your home stream and look for the “Topics to explore” cards. Topics will be rolling out over the next day or so, so don’t worry if you don’t see any suggestions right away.
After all of these updates, more people are discovering vibrant Communities and creating inspiring Collections than ever before. So it’s in this same spirit that we’re pleased to add three new much requested updates, rolling out over the next couple of weeks, to Google+.
Hiding low-quality comments
We’re making it easier to have good conversations by hiding lower quality comments on posts, so you can focus on the comments that matter most. If you’d like to see all the comments on a post, you can always click or tap “View more comments.”
Showing you more of what matters
To help you see more of the stuff you care about, we’ve adjusted Google+ to make the best use of your screen size and show you less white space and more posts. Photographers share big, beautiful images on Google+ every day, so we’ve also added zoom functionality to photos on Google+ web to let you get up close and personal with the images you’re interested in.
Bringing back Events
Finally (drumroll please!), we’re bringing Events over to the new Google+. While there’s more to be done to improve the experience, beginning January 24th you’ll be able to create and join events on Google+ web as you have in the past. Please note that Events will not be available for G Suite at this time.
With this latest round of updates, we believe the new Google+ is really your Google+— designed around your suggestions, requests and needs. It also means it’s time to say goodbye to classic Google+ on the web, which we’ll be turning down on January 24.
Just because we’re bidding adieu to classic Google+ doesn’t mean we’re done working on the new one. Our aim is to make Google+ the best place to connect around the things you care about, so please use the “Send Feedback” link in the apps and on the web to keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.
After all of these updates, more people are discovering vibrant Communities and creating inspiring Collections than ever before. So it’s in this same spirit that we’re pleased to add three new much requested updates, rolling out over the next couple of weeks, to Google+.
Hiding low-quality comments
We’re making it easier to have good conversations by hiding lower quality comments on posts, so you can focus on the comments that matter most. If you’d like to see all the comments on a post, you can always click or tap “View more comments.”
Showing you more of what matters
To help you see more of the stuff you care about, we’ve adjusted Google+ to make the best use of your screen size and show you less white space and more posts. Photographers share big, beautiful images on Google+ every day, so we’ve also added zoom functionality to photos on Google+ web to let you get up close and personal with the images you’re interested in.
Bringing back Events
Finally (drumroll please!), we’re bringing Events over to the new Google+. While there’s more to be done to improve the experience, beginning January 24th you’ll be able to create and join events on Google+ web as you have in the past. Please note that Events will not be available for G Suite at this time.
With this latest round of updates, we believe the new Google+ is really your Google+— designed around your suggestions, requests and needs. It also means it’s time to say goodbye to classic Google+ on the web, which we’ll be turning down on January 24.
Just because we’re bidding adieu to classic Google+ doesn’t mean we’re done working on the new one. Our aim is to make Google+ the best place to connect around the things you care about, so please use the “Send Feedback” link in the apps and on the web to keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.
Photographers of all specialities, skills and genres have long made their home on Google+, sharing their work with a supportive community. Whether it’s of toys, travel or street art, each photo has a unique story to tell, and deserves to be viewed at the best possible resolution.
Traditionally, viewing images at high resolution has also meant using lots of bandwidth, leading to slower loading speeds and higher data costs. For many folks, especially those where data is pricey or the internet is spotty, this is a significant concern.
To help everyone be able to see the beautiful photos that photographers share to Google+ in their full glory, we’ve turned to machine learning and a new technology called RAISR. RAISR, which was introduced in November, uses machine learning to produce great quality versions of low-resolution images, allowing you to see beautiful photos as the photographers intended them to be seen. By using RAISR to display some of the large images on Google+, we’ve been able to use up to 75 percent less bandwidth per image we’ve applied it to.
While we’ve only begun to roll this out for high-resolution images when they appear in the streams of a subset of Android devices, we’re already applying RAISR to more than 1 billion images per week, reducing these users’ total bandwidth by about a third. In the coming weeks we plan to roll this technology out more broadly — and we’re excited to see what further time and data savings we can offer.
Photographers of all specialities, skills and genres have long made their home on Google+, sharing their work with a supportive community. Whether it’s of toys, travel or street art, each photo has a unique story to tell, and deserves to be viewed at the best possible resolution.
Traditionally, viewing images at high resolution has also meant using lots of bandwidth, leading to slower loading speeds and higher data costs. For many folks, especially those where data is pricey or the internet is spotty, this is a significant concern.
To help everyone be able to see the beautiful photos that photographers share to Google+ in their full glory, we’ve turned to machine learning and a new technology called RAISR. RAISR, which was introduced in November, uses machine learning to produce great quality versions of low-resolution images, allowing you to see beautiful photos as the photographers intended them to be seen. By using RAISR to display some of the large images on Google+, we’ve been able to use up to 75 percent less bandwidth per image we’ve applied it to.
While we’ve only begun to roll this out for high-resolution images when they appear in the streams of a subset of Android devices, we’re already applying RAISR to more than 1 billion images per week, reducing these users’ total bandwidth by about a third. In the coming weeks we plan to roll this technology out more broadly — and we’re excited to see what further time and data savings we can offer.
Posted by Jason Douglas, PM Director for Actions on Google
The Google Assistant brings together all of the technology and smarts we've been building for years, from the Knowledge Graph to Natural Language Processing. To be a truly successful Assistant, it should be able to connect users across the apps and services in their lives. This makes enabling an ecosystem where developers can bring diverse and unique services to users through the Google Assistant really important.
In October, we previewedActions on Google, the developer platform for the Google Assistant. Actions on Google further enhances the Assistant user experience by enabling you to bring your services to the Assistant. Starting today, you can build Conversation Actions for Google Home and request to become an early access partner for upcoming platform features.
Conversation Actions for Google Home
Conversation Actions let you engage your users to deliver information, services, and assistance. And the best part? It really is a conversation -- users won't need to enable a skill or install an app, they can just ask to talk to your action. For now, we've provided two developer samples of what's possible, just say "Ok Google, talk to Number Genie " or try "Ok Google, talk to Eliza' for the classic 1960s AI exercise.
You can get started today by visiting the Actions on Google website for developers. To help create a smooth, straightforward development experience, we worked with a number of development partners, including conversational interaction development tools API.AI and Gupshup, analytics tools DashBot and VoiceLabs and consulting companies such as Assist, Notify.IO, Witlingo and Spoken Layer. We also created a collection of samples and voice user interface (VUI) resources or you can check out the integrations from our early access partners as they roll out over the coming weeks.
Coming soon: Actions for Pixel and Allo + Support for Purchases and Bookings
Today is just the start, and we're excited to see what you build for the Google Assistant. We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals. Developers who are interested in creating actions using these upcoming features should register for our early access partner program and help shape the future of the platform.
Build, explore and let us know what you think about Actions on Google! And to say in the loop, be sure to sign up for our newsletter, join our Google+ community, and use the “actions-on-google” tag on StackOverflow.
These were just some of the videos that brought Canadians to YouTube in 2016 to laugh, to share, to learn and to remember.
Top Trending Videos in Canada
TV’s YouTube Moment
The number of hours people spent catching up on late night clips nearly doubled in the last year alone. There’s no doubt that TV moments have taken on a life of their own through YouTube. In 2016, late night show channels had over 550M watch hours and over 8.5 BILLION views, as traditional television recognized the power and influence of the YouTube audience and embraced creating content for YouTube.
Canadian Content
Canada’s biggest YouTube star also had a tremendous year in 2016 - Superwoman Lilly Singh hit 10M subscribers, wrote her first book and collaborated with her friend Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on a few videos to help him launch his YouTube channel.
Rounding out the list were a few notable Canadian news moments, including a report by Global News reporter Reid Fiest who captured the enormous scale of the fire in Fort McMurray as cars streamed out of the city. And who could forget President Obama’s attempt to pronounce Mississauga during the State Dinner he hosted for Prime Minister Trudeau?
Rihanna and Drake took over Toronto this year, performing at OVO Fest and making headlines with a rumoured midnight dinner a Ripley’s Aquarium. But, it was when the couple dropped in on Toronto’s The Real Jerk to film the video for Work that a top trending YouTube sensation was born.
Globally, Calvin Harris’ video for This is What You Came For reached 1 BILLION views in just 167 days, making it Calvin Harris’ biggest YouTube video to-date. It was also Rihanna’s second guest performance to cross 1 billion views. (The first was with Eminem on Love the Way You Life which hit 1.2B views).
Canadian artists had a strong year on YouTube - in addition to Drake, both The Weeknd and Shawn Mendes were among the most-watched artists on YouTube. And Edmonton’s Ruth B burst onto the scene with Lost Boy, which she released for the first time on YouTube. In just a few months, her video has reached nearly 39M views around the world.
Before Canadians go to the movies, they head to YouTube to check out trailers - and this year, we saw a number of highly anticipated trailers for blockbuster franchises. Chief among them was Suicide Squad, the darkly comedic action movie featuring the antiheroes from the DC Comics universe. Filmed in Toronto, Suicide Squad not only delivered the most-watched trailer, but also the most-searched Halloween costume on Google - Harley Quinn.
Female-led stories also dominated, with appearances from the new Star Wars film Rogue One, the all-female cast of the remake of Ghostbusters, the not-yet-released Wonder Woman movie and the Blake Lively thriller The Shallows.
Ads used to be background noise or something you might fast forward. Since YouTube launched skippable ads six years ago, ads have become content that Canadians are choosing to watch. This year’s top trending ads demonstrate that brands are now creating content that’s meant to entertain.
In addition to the top trending videos, trailers and music videos, there were a few magical moments for Canada on YouTube in 2016.
We set a new Canadian record this summer, as Canadians both at home and around the world flocked to YouTube to watch CBC’s livestream of the Tragically Hip’s final concert in Kingston. Viewers from 188 different countries tuned in to watch the concert and post-concert show, bringing home the incredible global reach of YouTube.
We also turned to YouTube to remember Leonard Cohen. Following the announcement of the poet and songwriter’s death on November 10th, the video for his performance of Hallelujah was the most-watched video on YouTube that day. Hallelujah is actually THE most frequently covered song from before 2010 on YouTube, with 8.7K covers. Jeff Buckley’s cover of the iconic song remains the most popular cover on YouTube, with 84 million views.
The first US presidential debate also broke records on YouTube, with nearly 2 million concurrent views around the world - 14X more live viewership than the debates in 2012. Canada was the top country outside of the US that turned into the debate on YouTube.
2016 was also an incredible year for Canadian Creators. We saw 199 channels reach the 100k subscriber mark, 42 hit the 1M subscriber mark, and Canada’s biggest YouTube star, Lilly Singh, hit the 10M subscriber mark.
So take some time, relax, rewind and revisit your favourites from the past year!
Posted by Nicole Bell, communications manager, YouTube Canada
The G Suite team recently launched the very first Google Slides API, opening up a whole new set of possibilities, including leveraging data already sitting in a spreadsheet or database, and programmatically generating slide decks or slide content based on that data. Why is this a big deal? One of the key advantages of slide decks is that they can take database or spreadsheet data and make it more presentable for human consumption. This is useful when the need arises to communicate the information reflected by that data to management or potential customers.
Walking developers through a short application demonstrating both the Sheets and Slides APIs to make this happen is the topic of today's DevByte video. The sample app starts by reading all the necessary data from the spreadsheet using the Sheets API. The Slides API takes over from there, creating new slides for the data, then populating those slides with the Sheets data.
Developers interact with Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads. You create an array like in the JavaScript pseudocode below featuring requests to create a cell table on a slide and import a chart from a Sheet:
var requests = [
{"createTable": {
"elementProperties":
{"pageObjectId": slideID},
"rows": 8,
"columns": 4
}},
{"createSheetsChart": {
"spreadsheetId": sheetID,
"chartId": chartID,
"linkingMode": "LINKED",
"elementProperties": {
"pageObjectId": slideID,
"size": {
"height": { ... },
"width": { ... }
},
"transform": { ... }
}
}}
]; If you've got at least one request, say in a variable named requests (as above), including the Sheet's sheetID and chartID plus the presentation page's slideID. You'd then pass it to the API with just one call to the presentations().batchUpdate() command, which in Python looks like the below if SLIDES is your API service endpoint:
Creating tables is fairly straightforward. Creating charts has some magical features, one of those being the linkingMode. A value of "LINKED" means that if the Sheet data changes (altering the chart in the Sheet), the same chart in a slide presentation can be refreshed to match the latest image, either by the API or in the Slides user interface! You can also request a plain old static image that doesn't change with the data by selecting a value of "NOT_LINKED_IMAGE" for linkingMode. More on this can be found in the documentationon creating charts, and check out the video where you'll see both those API requests in action.
For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the video, check out the deep dive post. We look forward to seeing the interesting integrations you build with the power of both APIs!
