Could This Be the End of Google+?

It has recently been confirmed that Google is splitting it’s social network so Google+ will soon become Photos, Streams and Hangouts.

Bradley Horowitz, the new vice president of Google Photos and Stream recently posted saying, “Just wanted to confirm that the rumours are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Google+ has always incorporated photo tools which allow users to backup and edit their photos so introducing Google Photos as a standalone product will make these more accessible to those not interested in a Google+ account.

Google Stream will essentially be the Google+ experience we are familiar with now but with the additions of News and Blogger.

The third sector will be Hangouts, one of Google+’s more popular services. With features allowing users to host meetings, screen share with customers for support and record videos straight to YouTube, it’s one platform that differs from the rest in the sense that it’s something different to anything else we know.

Since beginning in 2011, Google+ has not been the most popular of social network sites and appears to be struggling to maintain regular users. This update could be seen as an attempt to revamp the services offered and to subtly rebrand, or maybe even draw the line under Google+ completely?

Google’s senior vice president of products, Sundar Pichai, briefly spoke about the decision in a recent interview, saying “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.””I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications, photos and the Google+ Stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area“.

The potential effect of Google+ giving Google a direct incorporation with social media signals and personal information was always great and we’ve seen some impact to search with Google+ posts showing in SERPs for signed in users, as well as the extent of the, now retired, Google Authorship functionality. However perhaps this is a sign that Google have changed the way they want to achieve this objective, especially on the back of the announcement that Google have struck a new deal with Twitter in February.

By moving away from under the Google+ brand name, the new features can gain reputations independently of peoples’ previous Google+ conceptions and employees can begin to think about the updates from a different perspective.

With the three main features all becoming three different apps, there is more potential to target different audiences and be successful as individual services, or will it remain the ‘ghost town’ of social networking as we know it now?