Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [72]
Head to the “From your phone” album of the Android or iPhone app, select one or more photos, and then tap the Share button and fill out a post to share with your circles.
Starting a Messenger Session (Apps Only)
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED to coordinate a group of people relatively quickly via text messaging or email to, for example, get everyone to agree on a lunch spot, arrange a time, and give directions? Nobody walks away from such an exchange feeling optimistic about the nature of human communication. Even if you figure out how to send text messages to multiple recipients, the replies arrive without context, and not everybody has access to email on their phone. That’s where Messenger, a feature of the Google+ mobile app, comes in. (When Google+ first launched, this feature was called huddles.)
NOTE
While the Google+ mobile website can do a lot of the same tricks as the Android and iPhone apps, you can’t use the browser version to start a Messenger session, although you can join a Messenger conversation someone else starts.
Tap Messenger on the home page of your Google+ app. There probably isn’t much on the page that appears, but Google+ points out just what to do: tap the speech-balloon icon in the upper right to start a Messenger session.
In the box at the top of the “New conversation” screen, you can type in people’s names or the name of a circle, just like when you share a post. If you’re going to be having a prolonged discussion with these folks, it’s often smart to create a circle for this purpose (see Chapter 2 for details), but otherwise, go ahead and type in names, and tap to select one of the contacts Google+ suggests.
After you select who you want in this Messenger session, type a note in the text box and then tap Send. When you send out your message, what happens next depends on how you’re connected to the people you selected. Those who have the Google+ app installed on their phone, have you in their circles, and haven’t either blocked you (Blocking, Muting, and Reporting Posts) or set their notifications to ignore Messenger invitations (Starting a Messenger Session (Apps Only)) will see your note on their phones right away. Those who don’t have you in their circles or who haven’t used Messenger yet will be invited to the Messenger session via a notification (see Chapter 4) and they’ll see an invite in their streams, too.
TIP
To send an image via Messenger, tap the camera icon at the bottom of the screen. You’ll get to choose whether to take a new photo or use one that’s saved on your phone. Next, either shoot the photo or select the stored one you want to send, and then beam the photo out to your Messenger group. (Images you send via Messenger automatically get added to a special “Photos from Messenger” album in the “Your albums” category of your Photos page; see Viewing Photos.)
Even if you head away from the Messenger section of the Google+ app or quit the app entirely, you’ll still get notifications about new Messenger messages. The form exact these notifications take depends on your device, the OS it runs, and your Google+ settings.
If you’ve included people in a Messenger session who aren’t on a smartphone with the Google+ app installed, but they’re on Google+ and have activated a phone number for text message notifications (Text Messages), they’ll receive an invitation to join your Messenger conversation on their cellphones. If they respond in the affirmative, they’ll start receiving texts and be able to reply to the whole group.
You can trade both text and photos in a Messenger session at a pretty rapid pace. And the advantage of this kind of exchange over simply texting or emailing all your friends is that the replies arrive sequentially, and that they’re easy to scroll through.
So what happens if you’re part of a Messenger conversation where, for example, you’ve had lunch with the crew and returned to work to attend a meeting—but your Messenger