Google+ lets you record and share video via webcam

What’s better than posting photos or text updates? Sharing videos, of course. So says Google, which has slightly enhanced its Google+ social network today with a webcam video recording option.

“Today we’re making video a bit more fun by letting you record and share videos of yourself using your webcam,” Google+ Photos engineer Shana Gitnick wrote in an update on the social site.

“To get started, click the video icon in the share box and choose Record Video,
Gitnick explained. “Once you’ve authorized Flash to access your camera, you can start recording. And once you’re done, the video appears as an attachment to your post — ready to share with your circles.”

The feature isn’t particularly innovative. Social networks have popped up over the years (only to subsequently disappear) to give web denizens a quick and easy way to record and share short video messages — you may remember 12seconds and the original Seesmic — and even Facebook has a record-via-webcam status update option.

But we totally get why Google is adding the new option: video, on the whole, is an essential part of the overall Google+ experience. The service’s Hangouts video conferencing feature and deep YouTube integration make the site an almost-unique social destination.

Google appears to be rolling out webcam video recording to members on a rolling basis. We’ve yet to get the feature ourselves.

[Image via guicry/Flickr]