Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [66]
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There’s no list of “correct” or “approved” hashtags out there—people just make ’em up on the fly. So you don’t have to wait to make sure you’ve seen someone else use a particular hashtag before you add it to one of your posts—you can create them with just a pound sign and a thought. Some catch on and get used by lots of people, others are just one-offs.
The inventor of hashtags, Chris Messina, now works for Google, and hashtags themselves have become a cultural phenomenon. So it makes sense that Google+has incorporated hashtags into its search abilities. When you or another Google+member adds a hashtag to a post, the hashtag shows up as a clickable link.
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Since Google+ doesn’t limit the length of your posts like Twitter does, you can include as many hashtags as you want.
Click a hashtag, and Google+ automatically runs a search for other posts that include that hashtag.
In your search results, you might not see the hashtag itself in the part of the post displayed in the result, but it’s in there somewhere—either later in the post (click “Expand this post” to see the rest) or in the comments. And that’s the point of adding hashtags: writing about a topic, not worrying about what searchable terms you’ve used, and then letting your hashtags do the librarian work of categorizing it.
As you might imagine, hashtag searches make for great saved searches, because they’re more focused and less likely than all but the most specific searches to include unrelated results. They also help you find particular posts. For example, if you knew that John Smith wrote something recently and hashtagged it with “#sabres,” you can just search for “John Smith #sabres” to pinpoint John’s comments about that (great) hockey team without having to sort through his other posts about hockey.
That’s the skinny on searching, sorting, and saving, as well as using and searching for hashtags on Google+. They’re all skills you get better at by trying, and it’s really hard to harm anything by doing so, so test the limits of what you can find and start adding hashtags to your posts. Next up, a look at how to do almost everything you’ve learned in your web browser on the smaller screens of mobile devices.
Chapter 8. Google+ Mobile
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SHARE ON GOOGLE+? Chances are, you want to relate things that happen to you, post photos and videos of neat things you see, and link to stuff you find on the Web. A lot of these things come up while you’re away from your desktop or laptop computer, but you may have an all-in-one camera, computer, screen, and web connection with you nearly all the time: your web-connected cellphone, or smartphone. If you have an Android phone, an iPhone, or most any web-connected device with a decent browser, you can get to your Google+ account from almost anywhere to see what’s happening in your streams, add your own two cents (or two pictures), and even add your location to your posts so people nearby can stop in and say hello.
Google+ looks and feels different on a phone or tablet than on a computer, but it should still feel familiar if you’re used to working with circles, streams, and sharing tools on your desktop or laptop. In some ways, using Google+ on the go can be a bit more fun—more instant gratification, less thinking through which adjective is just perfect for this phrase. You still have tight control over who you share with and how you get notified of new stuff, but everything gets pared down to the essentials. This chapter explains how to Google+ running on our device and how to make the most of it on smaller screens.
Getting Google+ onto Your Phone
NEARLY ANY CELLPHONE OR device with a good web browser can access Google+ whenever there’s an Internet connection available, but Google+ works a good bit better if you install a special program (a.k.a. “app”) designed specifically for interacting with Google+ on an Android or Apple device. The following sections explain how to install and configure those apps for the