Vox Media is excited to announce that we have worked closely with Google to integrate Google+ into Chorus and across all of our properties — SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon — in several different ways.
First, new users to any of our 300+ brands will be able to create a new account using Google+ to authenticate. This makes it quick, safe, and secure to sign-in and start interacting with the community. On both the iOS and Android apps for The Verge, users can also sign-up for an account using Google+ as an authentication option.
If you already have an account on one of our properties, you can easily associate your Google+ accounts with your existing Chorus account by visiting your Account Settings page.
Once you’re authenticated with Google+, no matter which Vox Media site you’re on, you will have the option to quickly share a story (including FanPosts, FanShots, and Forum Posts) with your circles of friends using Google+. Look for the Google+ Share button.
Finally, new users that sign up for an account on The Verge using Google+ authentication will get a special feature. If they’ve previously registered an Android device with Google, during the sign-up process on The Verge, they will be prompted to install The Verge’s Android app over-the-air with the click of a button. Pretty cool.
From the very beginning we have provided our users with choices about how they signup and sign-in to our sites by offering the ability to signup with OpenID, Yahoo and then Facebook. Adding Google+ is another high quality authentication option that we’re excited to introduce to the platform. We’ve been impressed by how Google+ is being developed not only as a destination but a broad communication layer across the Google ecosystem. This evolution of Google+ provides opportunities for strong integration with Chorus for an improved user experience across all our sites.
This is just the first wave of Google+ integration, and you can expect it to deepen over time.
We’re excited to have been invited by Google to participate in the Google+ Developer Sandbox at Google I/O, their annual developer conference in San Francisco. Along with a wide-range of other companies who have worked closely with Google, we’ll be showing developers what we’ve built and answering questions about how we approached our implementation. Stop by and say hello if you’re attending this year. Each day of the conference we’ll be highlighting the Google+ implementation of one of our properties - The Verge on Wednesday, SB Nation on Thursday and Polygon on Friday.