You have a Google + account. You may not know it, but you do. Everyone who has a Gmail or Youtube account has one. Everyone who uses Google\u2019s cloud productivity and storage suite has one. And everyone who has an Android phone has one. But the number of active users has always trailed far behind the number of accounts, drawing attention to the fact that Google\u2019s venture into social hasn\u2019t actually been very successful.<\/p>\n
On Monday, April 27 this year, Google announced that it would be splitting its social network into two. Surrendering to the facts – Google + is a competitor for Facebook the way Bob\u2019s Truck Shop is a competitor for General Motors – Google has broken the channel in two.<\/p>\n
Speaking on April 28, Sundar Pichai, Google\u2019s VP of products, told MWC that: \u2018For us Google+ was always two big things: one was building a stream, the second was a social layer, a common layer of identity; how sharing works across our products and services.\u2019 That mirrors criticism leveled at Google for inventing Google+ to solve the company\u2019s own internal problems, meaning users of Google products needed only a single login, allowing Google + to function like a foyer. No-one wants to hang out in a waiting room,though, so while Mr Pichai points to \u2018a passionate community of users\u2019 for the social side of +, it was never a contender when ranked against facebook and Twitter.<\/p>\n
Clarifying the future of Google+\u2019s component services, Mr Pichai said: \u2019we’re at a stage where use cases like photos and communications are big standalone use cases.\u2019 The future of Google+\u2019s services will be in three parts: Streams, Photos and Hangouts.<\/p>\n
Photos will focus on Google +\u2019s image service. Photos on Google + have always been far better quality than those on other social channels, but in some ways that\u2019s been part of the problem: while facebook and Twitter moved onto mobile right along with their customers, Google + was held back by file sizes so large they took forever to load on mobile devices. The service gets good usage but cutting it loose from the social network will probably make Streams easier to access.<\/p>\n
Streams will be the social element of Google +, separated from the photos service and providing faster (and more mobile-friendly) access for that passionate community who really do prefer Google + to other social networks.
\nFinally, there\u2019s the future of Hangouts. Hangouts has lost ground to other communications services, but Google\u2019s VP of product Bradley Horowitz argued in December that \u2018It’s texting, it’s telephony, it’s one-to-one, it’s many-to-many, it’s consumer, it’s enterprise,\u2019 and stated that its comprehensiveness made it unique. Hangouts does have some great features – but all this was being said a year ago about Google +.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You have a Google + account. You may not know it, but you do. Everyone who has a Gmail or Youtube account has one. Everyone who uses Google\u2019s cloud productivity…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n