Stephen Downes

By far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconferencew with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. "With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post." Too awesome. For my money, this becomes an immediate replacement for Elluminate (aka Blackboard Collaborate) in many open online classes (because, it's not like we can afford Blackboard's prices anyhow). Sadly, it's not available for everybody just yet - it's not enabled in my own account, for example - but is being rolled out gradually.