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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."
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
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
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).
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.