Pangasinan Social Media Day

While Pangasinan is bearing a 2- signal storm, it did not distress the excitement of the atmosphere. In fact, the social media people who gathered for the Social Media Day celebration were all in smiles upon arriving at the venue, Star Plaza, Dagupan City.

In attendance were GBG Dagupan members, bloggers, social media practitioners, mobile app and game developers, and students. Mr. Roland Umangay, one of the field reporters of the leading media broadcasting company outlet in the north, did not just show up. He brought the house down by singing at the top of his lungs during the karaoke part. And while he was at his game phase, others were spirited about what’s in store for the day.

Ms. Vanj Padilla with Roland Umangay

Google+ was the subject. GBG co- manager JR Padilla discussed how competent the multilingual social networking and identity service is compared against other prominent social networking sites. Despite being known of an early criticism as a ghost town, Google+ proved false by having smartly surpassed Twitter this January as the 2nd most popular social network in the US, with over 2,500 adult internet users (Burst Media). Let us also take time to admire its new design interface: a three column-wide grid of cards and a full- screen width of high-resolution photos and videos, where an option to switch to a one-column view is provided. I believe that this idea of exposing visitors to more visual content at once is genius.

JR Padilla, in his discussion about Google+

Its features (Stream, Circles, Messenger, Hashtag, Games, etc.) and their uses were also highlighted but there were two things that surely captured the attention of everybody, and those were: Auto Awesome and Hangouts.

After Auto Enhance, come along a new innovation: the Auto Awesome. By detecting the kinds of photos you take, Google will make necessary improvements. For example, if you upload a series of similar photos taken in a short period of time, it will automatically make an animated GIF out of it.  It will also make auto panoramas and HDR photos if you upload the right kinds of photos.

Google is clearly leveraging its substantial cloud facilities to try to make Google+ the best home for photos online. Here's an example I created using the feature:

TalkTV Global's cameraman, Romulus Gutierrez during a photo shoot.

In addition to this photo feature, Google's heavily-rumored unified messaging service, Hangouts, is integrated into the Google+ redesign. Google has released Hangout apps for Android, iOS, and Chrome (as well as integration with Gmail). Instead of a mess of Google Talk, Google Messenger, and Video Hangouts, it's all streamlined across platforms.

The Hangout app has more mobile messaging DNA as it presents users with a list of recent text conversations instead of a contact list. Also, each conversation gets its own name, like a chat room, and can be labeled with an image or one of Google's new emoji (Japanese term for the ideograms or smileys). Thanks to Google's cloud, Hangouts can sync everywhere - giving people access to conversations on any device. 

And after a learnt discussion, what better way to conclude a wonderful event than by having loads and loads of photos.

Ms. Vanj Padilla and the social media practitioners with their G+ stickers

Hashtagging the event...