In a blog post today titles “Everything in its right place” Google will be removing the required Google+ integration from all its products starting off with YouTube.
In the coming weeks YouTube will no longer require a Google+ account to make comments or upload content and soon after they will give creators the ability to remove Google+ from the account all together without losing data. (Wait for the tool as if you do it now you will lose all your data). This change will come with praise and cheers across the YouTube community who universally panned the forced Google+ requirements which even big creator came out and spoke against and even some disabling comments on their videos to avoid the massive amount of spam coming in. Also your YouTube comments will no longer show up in Google+.
Google will be removing Google+ requirement from the rest of its products. They already removed it from Gmail, Search, Photos, Hangouts, etc. They will be taking what they have that it is Google+ and focusing it more on a dedicated social platform for ” a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them” according to Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing at Google whole wrote up the blog post about these announcements.
Is this the end for Google+?
Well it’s a bit early to call as Google is still dedicated to supporting the platform with the promise to add new features like Google+ Collections where people can share posts based on topics that they care about.
I believe what we are going to see is more features stripped out of Google+ that isn’t needed and either dumped or moved to other services until they get to the core experience they want it to be. Then from there I think they will re-brand the name to something else to start on a better note and move away from the Google+ branding as that has a bad stigma that isn’t going to chance or attract users to it.
This is now the 2nd time Google has done a major overhaul when it comes to social networks. If we remember not too long ago Google Buzz was around and it was one of the most hated social networks ever. It was so bad that Google had to shut down the program and come back with something else which was Google+. Now we have to wait and see what they will do with Google+ going in the future.
Source: Google Blog
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