Google announced in a post by Bradley Horowitz on Google plus the development of Streams and Photos services in standalone products earlier this week.
Horowitz does not mention Google+ anywhere in his post, but considering that both of these products are a big part of the user's experience on the Google+ network, their segregation seems a little suspicious and questions.
Google has already provided a great deal of evidence to dismantle its social network. Especially in the last 18 months.
Let's start with the mandatory registration in Google plus when signing up for new Google services. Previously, if someone made a Google account, there was a Google+ account, which is no longer the case.
Following the departure of Vic Gundotra, creator of the social network, the company began moving the Google+ team to its development team Android.
Then came the death of the Authorship (media administrators know).
Even so, Google+ has continued to develop some services. For example, it has not been long since + Post ads became available to all advertisers.
Maybe Google hopes people will continue to uses Google plus for advertising purposes. But it seems ridiculous, for a social network, that its members are not that fanatical. Is it worth it for businesses to stay?
Surely Google+ has never acquired the social commitment and activity that Facebook enjoys.
If we now take the Streams and Photos services from the network, there is not much left that will attract the interest of users. The service Hangouts it already became a stand-alone application in the fall. With this latest announcement, it's clear that Google has probably abandoned its plan to develop a social network to compete with Facebook.
Google Plus will probably be part of the range of products that Google has stopped. We've already said goodbye to Aardvark, Google Buzz, Labs, Google Answers, recently on Google Code and others.
The company's plans for a Facebook-sized social network appear to have faded. Hangouts is not an integral comeye or exclusive only to the social network anymore. Perhaps hitting Facebook was one of their most ambitious efforts to date. The idea wasn't bad and you can't blame them for trying.
