This new visual focus goes along with Google focusing more on social photo sharing – in fact, I wrote earlier this week that photos have become a kind of “secret weapon” in Google’s competition with Facebook and others. “We wanted to make sure that the content is the hero,” Google’s Bradley Horowitz said at the Google+ photographers conference in reference to the new app design this week, where he also called photos “the life-blood” of Google+.

Interesting about this visual refresh was that the company decided to roll it out on iOS first. I asked a company spokesperson today whether there are any significant differences between the Android and the OS app, and was told that the ability to start Hangouts is unique to the Android experience.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Check out my entire video interview with Trey Ratcliff, or continue reading below:

Ratcliff isn’t alone in his use of Google+. Photographers in particular have embraced the social network with enthusiasm, making use of the way it presents photos within news feeds and the integrated lightbox that makes it easy to browse entire galleries. This has led to not only grassroots-organized Google+ photo walks — meet ups of like-minded photographers who go out in the field and take photos together — but also a Google+ specific conference that is bringing amateur and professional photographers to San Francisco this week. “It’s exploded,” said conference organizer Scott Kelby about photographs flocking to Google+. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Google has obviously been paying attention to this. You only have to look to the recent revamp of the Google+ iOS app, which now puts a much bigger emphasis on photos, to see where things are going for Google+.

Flickr, MIT and Google+

Trey Ratcliff’s photos on Google+

One of the reasons photos are starting to play such a big role for Google+ is Bradley Horowitz, the VP of product management for the social network. Horowitz studied image recognition at the MIT Media Lab and built a visual-information retrieval company. He went on to work for Yahoo, where he met Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr. The duo challenged his views on image processing when he told them about the problems computers have in making sense of photos, Horowitz recalled during a keynote on Tuesday morning, “They looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Why don’t you just ask people?’”

Horowitz described this simple question as a turning point for his career. Looking at the way Flickr used tags and other social features to organize information, he realized social engineering was much more capable than algorithms alone. “This field of social computing really lit up inside of me,” he said. Horowitz eventually oversaw the acquisition of Flickr through Yahoo, and at the time told me in a conversation that his goal was the Flickrization of the entire company.

Yahoo eventually decided to go down another route, and lately, people have been asking themselves how the company managed to kill Flickr – if not the site, then definitely the spirit of the service. Now it looks like Horowitz wants to bring some of that spirit to Google.

Google’s answer to Instagram

Of course, others are trying to leverage the inherent social nature of photography as well. Facebook’s users are uploading 250 million photos every day to the site, and yet it decided to spend a billion dollars for social photo-sharing service Instagram. Om made a good argument recently that this acquisition was all about mobile photo sharing, something that Facebook hasn’t been as good at.

And Google+? It has built photo sharing into the core of its mobile apps, allowing users to automatically upload each and every photo to the cloud. Presenting these photos better on your mobile, as it has done with the iOS app, is an important first step. But Horowitz already hinted at the next step on Tuesday: photo processing. “Today, the tools are too segmented,” he said, summing up the discrepancy between an Instagram filter and a full-blown app like Photoshop. “Either they are toys, or they are for the pro.” Google+ has some rudimentary online editing for photos built in, but Horowitz hinted at the possibility of extending these much further.

Making sense of all of your sensors

Another challenge is making sense of all the photos that are uploaded every day. The instant upload functionality of the Google+ mobile apps makes no distinction between your best shots and those your phone unknowingly takes in your pocket. Horowitz said that eventually, services should take into account all kinds of sensual information to figure out which photos matter most — including the fact that our heart jumps when we shoot something that really touches us. “I’m constantly giving signal that is lost, that could be captured to find those moments that are meaningful, that are special,” he said.

Horowitz prefaced these remarks by saying that this isn’t about concrete Google projects but about ways he would personally improve photography. But then he assured his audience, “We have the tools at Google to deal with this information overload problem.”

Cameras that measure your heart rate to tell Google which photos matter — that may sound like science fiction. But so did an idea like Google’s Project Glass just a few months ago. If anything it’s clear Google is taking photos very seriously. And photographers like Ratcliff embracing Google+ could be a first sign of this strategy starting to pay off.

Image of SLR camera courtesy of Flickr user BotheredByBees

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

It’s been a rule of thumb for the last few years, and has developed into an important guiding principle for a lot of people thinking about how the web helps us connect with each other.

But is its time over?

In a post on the BBC’s Internet Blog, senior research executive Holly Goodier suggests that the One Percent Rule has outlived its usefulness, with a study of British web users showing that people are now drastically more interested in — and likely to engage with — online content.

In fact, she says, the One Percent Rule has not just become outdated — it’s been blown away. Surveys by her team found that a full 77 percent of people were now engaged online:

My team and I conducted a large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today – from sharing links, to writing blogs and uploading photos. And it revealed a fascinating, and at times, surprising picture.

1. The model which has guided many people’s thinking in this area, the 1/9/90 rule, is outmoded. The number of people participating online is significantly higher than 10%.
2. Participation is now the rule rather than the exception: 77% of the UK online population is now active in some way.
3. This has been driven by the rise of ‘easy participation’: activities which may have once required great effort but now are relatively easy, expected and every day. 60% of the UK online population now participates in this way, from sharing photos to starting a discussion.

Wow!

While it should perhaps be no surprise that making the tools for interacting and sharing easier leads to more interacting and sharing, who would have expected that such a drastic change could occur? After all, we’re seeing a nearly eightfold increase in what we thought was happening to what is really going on.

Amazing, huh?

Not quite.

The BBC appears to have missed the fact One Percent Rule was never intended to dictate a single pattern across the entire web: it was a rough guideline for expectations inside any given online community or service.

Should it be a surprise that 77 percent of people are active in some way in some sort of community? I don’t think so — and to suggest otherwise ignores the fact that people behave in different ways in different places. After all, like me, you could be highly active on Twitter, and therefore part of the one percent, but remain a lurker on a site like Metafilter (even though I’ve been a member there for a decade).

Or you could be a highly active Wikipedia editor (one percent) who uses Instagram simply to browse pictures from people you know (10 percent). Or you could be an active commenter on one blog but never leave comments anywhere else. It goes on.

That’s where your 77 percent comes from: the BBC research is really just comparing apples and oranges.

In fact, at the same time as declaring the One Percent Rule dead, another post Goodier uses to support this thesis actually seems to prove that it’s very much alive and kicking.

In a post about the levels of participation with BBC Radio 1, one of Britain’s most popular stations with a reach of around 13 million people each week, producer Jem Stone points out a couple of statistics.

Regularly over 1.5m users now regularly see photos, links and clips via the Radio 1/1xtra Facebook pages every week.

Radio 1 Twitter accounts regularly receive over 150K retweets and replies a week.

So out of a total audience of 13 million, 150,000 actively create messages about the station on Twitter, and 1.5 million — and order of magnitude more — consume and interact with that content on Facebook. The remainder, more than 11 million people, simply listen to the show. Looks a lot like the One Percent Rule to me.

I’ve no doubt that the way we share and engage online, and in different communities, is shifting as the web becomes richer and more popular.

But the reality is that almost everyone online does something, somewhere. And that fact doesn’t make the One Percent Rule any more or less valid — all it says is that the internet is a vast place, and we do different things in different places. And if you’re surprised by that? Well, perhaps it’s time to take a break.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• How to navigate the new world of digital advertising
• Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age

Horowitz, who said the motto he’s given his team is “We build apps for people, not markets,” said though Buzz stumbled out of the gate, Google is fully behind it as well as the general idea of improving products by making them social. “We can’t care about Google’s goal of organizing the world’s information without talking about people,” he said. Those mottos and goals are well-placed, but now Google has to prove it can actually put them to work in its products — especially considering the failings of Buzz 1.0.

Some of the key items on Buzz’s roadmap include “feature-full APIs,” an expansion of who and what people can follow on the service, and better relevance tools, Horowitz said. “Ultimately we’d like to provide something that’s a tool for managing attention.” That would require a few tweaks. First, would be a notion of following that’s “less Boolean,” where you don’t have to get all or nothing of a person’s updates. Buzz will try to predict whether you’ll find information relevant rather than giving you everything. Horowitz commented to the voluble McClure, “that would allow me to get the parts of your life I’m interested in and filter out…most of it.”

Second, the notion of following would extend beyond friends and people to brands and places, just like it does on Twitter, where any entity can have a profile, said Horowitz. He seemed to imply that Buzz could be combined or integrated with Google Reader. And third, Buzz will attempt to be bring information together in a way that means you have to visit fewer “silos and inboxes,” with the goal of “the opportunity to return time to people’s lives.”

Horowitz said that Buzz may find a way to make use of its original idea of autofollow, which pre-populated users’ Buzz profiles with their contacts and was the most widely decried feature. “Autofollow was really misunderstood,” he said. When Google can do a good job of interpreting signals and connections, “If control is there then they will opt in.” He also said he felt users reacted so strongly to Buzz because Gmail is so important to them. His analogy: “Would you really want someone to try out their new algorithm on a pacemaker?”

Lastly, on the topic of Google Docs, Horowitz said to expect multiple new launches in the coming year. He noted that the product was cobbled together from a variety of acquisitions — like Writely, JotSpot and Zenter — and there are more opportunities for integration across document types. “In 2010 you will really see them hum in tandem.”

Related from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Google Buzz’s True Home Is in the Enterprise

Photo (from a different event) courtesy Flickr user Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.