Google+ Home Surveillance

If you’re fabulous enough to have received an intive to the exclusive Google+, the latest social media splash, you might also like to know that their Hangouts feature offers an easy way to set up simple home surveillance monitoring.

Google+ Hangouts offers face-to-face video chats with several of your friends at the same time.  But what if you were just using two of your own personal accounts with one of the account’s webcam trained on an area of interest? 

That’s what a Lifehacker reader did and explained the process and results of using Google+ Hangouts with a webcam to keep watch over your house:

You can use Google Hangouts as an on demand remote camera viewer. First, create a second Google Account, and put the alternate account in its own circle. Then, start a hangout with just that circle. When you want to checkup on how everything’s going along in your house, you can just join the hangout with your alternate account, and you should see what’s happening. Of course, for more complicated and long term camera solutions, you would need some specific software. This is just a no additional software approach to quickly checking up on your house while you are away.

Lifehacker tester Whitson Gordon notes that this will work even with the screensaver on, just be sure to turn the computer’s “Sleep” function off if you want continual surveillance access.

Via Lifehacker