As you may already know, Gmail is one of the over 60 different services provided by the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) giant, which has announced a few days ago that it has integrated the well-known Google+ with Gmail. This comes with a very useful and user-friendly feature that basically suggests you some of your Google+ contacts whenever you are composing an e-mail and type in the e-mail recipients in Gmail. This is very time-effective and convenient, given the fact that you can basically email all your Google+ contacts, no matter if you know their email addresses or not.
The only condition for you to be able to enjoy this newly implemented feature is to add the Google+ users to your Circles (connections list). After you add the recipient, he or she can effortlessly reply to your email and when that happens, their email address will be automatically displayed. In spite of the fact that some people worry about the privacy controls (as now everybody can contact you if they have you in their Google Circles), it must be said that the email address of your recipient will not be revealed to you after inserting their name in the “Recipient” field – that will happen only if and when the recipient decides to reply to your message.
This feature was implemented three days ago and it can be easily accessed by all Google+ and Gmail users. Besides this, the greatest thing about this new feature is that the Gmail user actually has full control over it – he can decide whether or not he can extend the people he can add to the recipients field. Also, you can send emails not only to the contacts you have added to your connections list (the “Circles” list mentioned above), but also to those who are in the Circles of your friends, meaning that you can reach out to a lot more people than you normally would, before this feature was implemented.
In spite of the fact that integrating these two highly popular programs is surely very beneficial for the users, some privacy advocates even compare this new integration with the Buzz investigation where the privacy rights of the users were violated. Also, others claim that Google is trying all sorts of tactics and strategies to boost the popularity of Google+ which, as they say, is far from being as popular as Twitter or Facebook. Regardless of the negative reactions to this strategic move, one thing is for sure: this change certainly makes it easier for Google users to communicate with one another, while still maintaining some degree of privacy!
Google has announced its intentions of integrating Google+ with Gmail and taking these services a mile further quite some time ago, yet the changes only became effective recently. By integrating Google+ with Gmail, Google hopes to facilitate the communication between contacts as well as to help them save some time and trouble, if they truly need to get in touch with somebody and they do not know their email address. Besides Gmail, it is known that Google has integrates several other popular services as well, YouTube and Blogger being only two of the most popular ones.
