Google+ Divided Into Photos and Streams, With New Boss

An anonymous reader writes It seems Google+ will see some significant changes under new boss Bradley Horowitz. Google+ will be separated into different products: Photos and Hangouts will be split out, and the social part is now called "the stream". From the article: "Google+ has taken a lot of criticism — notably the infamous 'ghost town' knock that it's devoid of users and concerns about Google's attempts to force its relevance by tying it in with functions like search results and YouTube comments. But Google executives have denied the 'ghost town criticism over and over. In part that's because the company used Google+ to describe more than just its Facebook-esque service for posting and commenting — the part now called Streams. For Google, Google+ also has been the "social spine" that unifies Google users' activities under a single unified identity."

Comments

I like the ghost town.

[IMarvinTPA]

The ghost town state actually makes it easier to follow a few things and keep up. My Facebook feed is long and Facebook's most-recent sorting likes to pick random dates out of the comments of the postings to "refresh" it. With what I follow on G+, a quick browse will catch me up on all of what I am following. It is a feature to me.

IMarv

Hardly anyone says, "I don't use Google+"

[EmperorOfCanada]

Hardly anyone says, "I don't use Google+". I know people who say, "I don't use Facebook", or "I dumped facebook." but with G+ it is just sort of assumed. Sort of like it is assumed that people don't use MySpace.

The only time anyone I know mentions G+ is when they blah blah about how G is being an ass about linking it to other things. Google tried to make it relevant but offered nothing that was really new. I found the whole circles thing a confused mess.

In fact the only people who I find tend to have a google plus presence also seem to have something to do with Google. Either they work for google or do something with Stanford and thus probably are surrounded by googly people.

I would be curious to know how much money has been spent trying to prop up G+?

Re:Hardly anyone says, "I don't use Google+"

[Runaway1956]

G+ had so much promise. They screwed up twice. When they linked virtually all services together, then again when they tried to insist that you use your real name on your accounts.

Hey, Picasso was a pretty cool thing, but I had little use for it. Gmail is pretty cool, and I use it a lot. Google Talk is really cool - I don't need it often, but when I do need it, it is pretty much indispensible.

WTF do I want all of that linked together? One little code screwup somewhere could expose all of my email to people in hangouts, or expose the mail of THOSE people to ME. G+ should have no connection to email. In order to tie any accounts together, the user should be required to explicitly do so.

Today, I can't believe that I anxiously waited for an invite to G+ when it started up.

Not what i hoped

[LegionX]

Good of them to do something with photos. But what i really wish they did was to turn the circle concept on it's heads.

Content should be put in circles instead of people. As an example I like to follow Linus Torvalds, but only for Linux related stuff - if they allowed linus to put his Linux content in Linux circles, and Diving stuff in Diving circles, and then allowed me to follow the content i like, then we could talk about managing information.

Pinterest is splitting it the right way, but are only focused on pictures. I want google+ to do it for content.

Re:Not going to use it

[Flavianoep]

The requirement of using G+ to post on Youtube has made this a better world. I haven't posted any comment on Youtube videos since that tie-in began to be enforced.

Re:Photos being separated

[koinu]

1) Google+ is probably not for friends, but for interesting people/companies/organizations/topics who you want to follow.

2) You can easily post a link which aggregates well with Facebook (this is probably the social network for people like friends and family, who you really don't want to follow, but only want to brag to about what you just ate and how cool your new mobile phone is).

Haters gonna hate...

[gbcox]

I've never really understood the vitriol toward G+. The press doing what they do (and no doubt strongly encouraged by Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) created a narrative of Google taking aim at Facebook and how they will most certainly fail. Google has repeated many times what the G+ initiative was about, but the press either ignored the facts or said Google was lying. How dare Google try to disrupt their narrative with something as inconsequential as facts. G+ is a framework to unify Google services. Before, it was a complete mess. You had different userids and passwords, Google App accounts were completely walled off from non-app services, every service had it's own comment engine. This was because each of those services were developed in their own bubble. Now, Google has a unifying framework for existing and new services as they are created. Yes, I'm sure they would have been thrilled if the G+ stream would be more popular than FB, but that wasn't the goal. They had to do something with the mess of unrelated services. It was becoming an administrative nightmare for them. Making hangouts and photos available through their own entry point is a good thing. Some people didn't want to deal with the stream or even see it. They figured fine, make a separate entry point. The important thing to remember though is the framework did exactly what they wanted it to do, and it is a success. You have one Google account that accesses all their services. Apps users can access all services. The more people use the services they'll find it's easy to just click a button to put it in the stream if they wish.