Another Social Network Bites the Dust…The End of Google Plus?
On March 1, 2015, Bradley Horowitz (a Google VP), posted on his Google Plus page that he will be running Google Photos and Streams products. Although his post itself doesn’t mention Google Plus and there has been no official announcement from Google that Google Plus will be retired, other news sources have reported that Google Plus will be breaking up into distinct services.
For example, The Verge reported that Hangouts will continue to operate, but as a stand-alone product, and that the split divides Google Plus into distinct realms – the social aspect (streams); photos; and communications. Gigaom, Mashable, Business Insider and other outlets have featured similar stories over the past week, but none have much detail to date.
Search Engine Journal reported, however, that Google is not, in fact, separating Google+ into separate products, but instead simply changed an internal team name, and that no “user-facing” changes are actually in the works. This seems to contradict the interview given at Mobile World Congress in Spain by Sundar Pichai, Senior VP of Products at Google this past week as reported in the articles mentioned above and in Venture Beat.
If Google does decide to do away with the social network aspect of Google+ it wouldn’t be the first time Google has abandoned a product. And it will be interesting to see what they do with Photos and whether both photos and hangouts survive. Stay tuned!