As a Facebook and Twitter competitor, Google+ never really stood a chance. By some combination of odd design, confusing nomenclature—remember Circles? Sparks?—and the simple fact that no one ever really used it, Google’s grand plan to unite its many products into a single social product just didn’t pan out. So it should surprise no one that three and a half years after its launch, Google has re-organized the product, and put Bradley Horowitz, Google VP and one of Google+’s key architects, in charge of “Google’s Photos and Streams products.” Sources confirm that Google has no immediate plans to ditch the name “Google+,” but what that name represents is about to dramatically change. It appears Photos and Streams will cease to be simply features of Google+, and will become two distinct products under Horowitz’s watch. (Google wouldn’t elaborate on its plans except to say no product changes are happening right now.)
The change comes on the heels of Google SVP Sundar Pichai telling Forbes that “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.” Google+ was originally supposed to be a one-stop shop for all the ways we interact with each other. Clearly the vision has changed.
But don’t write the obituary yet. It would be a mistake to call this a retreat, or an admission of failure. This is actually Google doing what Google does best: relentlessly optimizing its products based on data and feedback. There’s a small but very dedicated core of Google+ users, for whom Streams will now simply be a cleaner, more focused product. (At least, until Google kills it off, as is its ruthless tendency with power-user products like Reader. Actually, let’s not talk about that, I’m still not ready.) The truth is that when Google launched Google+, it actually launched three things. What it didn’t realize was that the two that weren’t “the social network,” Hangouts and Photos, were actually the future of social networking.
Google+ was secretly the best photo service around.
Google+ was quietly the best photo-storing platform on the internet, and quickly became the place I dumped all my photos. It comes with a truckload of storage, really easy tools for editing and sharing, and an ultra-visual layout that was copied by basically every other photo-storage site on the planet. You can build albums with friends, even storing photos you share in messages in a constantly-updating album accessible to only you and a buddy. There’s some amazing machine-learning happening there, wherein Google can ditch your crappiest photos and even combine a few to make sure you get one with everyone smiling—which, at least in my family, is essentially a miracle. My favorite tool is the one that stitches together into a GIF a bunch of photos you took in rapid succession, which always looks either perfect or totally insane, and is really fun either way.
Hangouts, meanwhile, quickly became a powerful and versatile communications tool. It’s both the evolution of GChat and Android’s answer to iMessage, and it supports voice, text, photos, emoji, more emoji, and basically every way people communicate on any platform. It’s been bigger than Google+ for some time now, but it was a core piece of the early offering.
Combine those two things—communication and photos—and what do you have? A social network, right? Google thought so, anyway. What Google believed it was launching three years ago was a series of products built around a stream, a list of status updates and links that at that time was the core element of a social network. But social networking is bigger than that, and as it has shifted to mobile it has split largely into two camps: messaging and photos. For every Facebook and Twitter, there’s also Instagram (photos), WhatsApp (messaging), Facebook Messenger (messaging), Tumblr (mostly photos), YikYak (messaging), Snapchat (photos), and on and on. It’s to Facebook’s credit that it owns basically half that list—it understood before anyone that our online social interactions can’t be captured in a single feed. Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook all have different purposes, different uses; trying to cram them all into a single bucket doesn’t make any sense. It took Google a while, but it too seems to be finally recognizing that.
Google as a social network is very much alive. Pichai told Forbes that Google+ was always at least as much about identity as socializing—the goal was to connect and cohere who you are across all its different products. In that sense, Google+ worked; from your horrifically racist YouTube comments to your Blogger blog to your Gmail, you’re the same person everywhere. That helps Google know more about you so that it can place more and better ads in front of you. And it makes your social experience more cohesive. The difference with these changes is that your social, interactive experience isn’t relegated to a single screen with too much white space and not enough people.
It’s everywhere, on every platform, based around what we want to share, where, and with whom. And it makes automatic GIFs out of your photos. If that can’t be a successful social network, well, I don’t know what can.
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