The following is guest contributed post by Deidre Bakker-Riches, owner of a boutique marketing firm and consultancy, Twlv31 Marketing, and the Head of Communications for Las Vegas advertising agency, Up All Day Creative Solutions (originally published by Mobile Leaders Alliance).
It was June 2011 when Google unveiled its latest product — a new social endeavor designed to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, better known as Google+. From that point forward the search engine giant catapulted itself into the social media realm and Google+ had all the buzz.
Fast-forward to summer 2015, and Google’s social platform is still making headlines… however, not in the same way it did four years prior. On July 27, Google announced on its blog that it would no longer require people to use a Google+ account in order to login to its other, more popular services, such as YouTube. Ah, the first nail in the Google+ coffin. The blog stated:
“When we launched Google Plus, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes.”
While this change will likely result in the downfall of Google’s social platform, the vast majority of users were thrilled (especially those YouTube enthusiast). And, fortunately, Google had even better news on the horizon for the mobile world.
A few weeks later, on August 10, Google announced yet another change that was underway — Google Hangouts was finally getting its own site. The new dedicated website for Hangouts will provide a communication platform for instant messaging, voice and video calls. Google said that these “big improvements” would make Hangouts faster, simpler and easier on the eyes… and now, it can also better compete with Facebook’s standalone messenger. More importantly, this change is beneficial for users who were active on Hangouts, but didn’t want to be required to login to Gmail, Google+ or Google Chrome in order to use the messenger.
Then, on August 18, Google revealed its third major change… aka the Golden Ticket! In an effort to prevent the overwhelming urge to dismantle and throw your Wi-Fi router in the garbage or perhaps out the window, Google announced it partnered with TP-LINK to launch OnHub, or as they call “a different kind of router for a new way to Wi-Fi.” To help alleviate endless headaches and spotty connections, OnHub (with its stylish design) promises to make your existing Wi-Fi faster, more reliable, and provide you with the ability to easily update and fix your connection.
To use the OnHub router, customers simply download a Google app to their smartphone, called “Google On” (available on both Apple and Android). The app will then walk you through the setup process, tell you how much bandwidth your devices are consuming, let you run a network check, and even inform you of any Wi-Fi issues and provide suggestions to fix them. In addition, instead of continuously losing your username and password, the Google On app will securely store all of your information enabling you to easily text or email it to a friend so they can join in on all the glory that is fast, reliable Wi-Fi. OnHub is currently available for pre-order for $199.99 from a variety of online retailers and will be for sale in retail stores in the U.S. and in Canada in the coming weeks.
With all these developments, it is clear that Google is genuinely trying to revamp and improve its entire mobile and social experience for the better. And although we may eventually see the demise of Google+, giving Google Hangouts its own platform while also launching OnHub are certainly steps in the right direction — hey, if Google can fix my Wi-Fi issues, count me in!
