Google announced that it will stop requiring users to have a Google Plus account in order to be able to engage in exchanges with other users on topics regarding Google products.
Google+ has been launched with the aim to create a real competitor to some other leading social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. However, the ambitions of Google regarding Google+ were not met. The product had never taken off in popularity and it was slowly dying even since it was first launched.
Google+ was launched four years ago. It was intended to create a huge social network with over a billion users posting photos, updating their status and keeping in touch with their network of friends, colleagues and family members. Google aimed to make its own social network, Google+, a "platform layer", a mobile app and product, an unified base for Google's sharing models.
Brad Horowitz, Google's executive for the Google+ product since earlier this year, declared that from now on Google users will no longer need a Google+ account. He explained that the company's well intentional goal could not be reached, since its experts realized Google+ has become a product that leads to experiences users may find confusing sometimes. And one of the most annoying and confusing user experience was the requirement that a user have a Google+ profile and account in order to be able to log into other Google services.
In late 2013, the most notable complaint came when Google imposed this requirement on YouTube viewers. Years before YouTube was acquired by Google, viewers were used to post comments on the video site without having a Google+ account, which wasn't even launched when YouTube started to offer its video channels online.
According to a Google blog, now YouTube is among the first places where Google is not requiring users to have a Google+ account in order to be able to comment, create channels or upload videos. Google Photos, a service for video and photo storage launched by Google earlier this year, does not require users to have a Google+ account in order to share anything they want.
It seems that Google has renounced to their ambitions to become the next big social network. According to the former Google+ head Vic Gundotra, Google+ has only 300 million monthly active users in late 2013, at a time when Facebook had over one billion monthly actives. Today, Facebook reaches more than 1.4 billion active monthly users.
Horowitz declared that Google+ will focus now only on connecting users around specific topics and interests. He also shared the fact that the Google+ team changed its name to Streams, Photos and Sharing or in short SPS.
Location and other things people share often on social networks are being moved to other Google apps like the video-chat and messaging service Hangouts. According to the company, in the future a Google Account will be enough for any users who want to communicate, share content, create a YouTube channel across Google.
