Google announced a lot of new products including Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Nexus 7, Nexus Q and to celebrate the 1st birthday of its own social networking site, it announced some new features that the site will sport from now on.

Google+ has had a rough start even though it became hugely popular even before it was actually released to the public. During its beta testing period, the limited invite-only membership made it a sensation among social-enthusiasts. But the zeal soon fizzled out after everyone saw what it really was. Clearly everyone was far too comfortably settled in with Facebook to be bothered with Google+, even though it introduced some great new features such as Hangout, Circles and an integrated Google account which now almost everyone uses. Facebook followed suit and introduced similar features too, and Google+ was left whimpering in the corner.

But the story does not end there; Google+ survived. It did not sink down to oblivion like Google Buzz. It did have some loyal users who actually used the site like it should be used and it still stands on its own. Google+ celebrated its first birthday yesterday at Google IO 2012. Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google+ announced some new features to be added to the social site at the keynote. Google+ has over 250 million users and most of its users are using it on a hand-held device, rather than on laptops or desktops. So to make the mobile experience even more entertaining and engaging Google renovated the interface of the Google+ app for Android tablets and the iPad. The update for android tablets will be available today and iPads will get the update sometime soon.

Google+ also got a shiny new feature- Google+ Events. According to Google your next party will be even more fun with the Events app. It helps out in your events before, during and after the event. Before the event you can create beautiful invitations using cinemagrams available in the options and send out to your invitees. They can confirm the invite and add it to their Google Calendar. During the event you can take pictures and share them directly to Google+ so that it shows up on the event page. All your guests (invited through Google+) can see and post pictures on the page, just like you. After the event all the pictures added during the event will remain there on the event page in the chronological order. All of the contributing photographers and guests can see each others’ pictures and so it becomes a combined album.

It is actually useful since most of our pictures are lost after the event and getting those from the guests is always a daunting task. Now all your pictures from different perspectives can be added to the page simultaneously. You can also create a live slideshow to view it live during your event or project it on a screen somewhere. That will also entertain the guests during a party. It might actually be a great new feature but not many users are there on Google+ to use it.