It might be the end of Google+ as we know it, but even Google admitted it was about time to stop forcing Google+ on people who wanted to use the company’s other digital services and products.
On Monday, the search giant announced that the struggling social media platform will soon make a significant policy change, which made marketers wonder if this development is another way of saying that Google+ is on its death bed.
When agency executives were asked to weigh in on the matter, instead of the expected eulogies, they offered some nuanced answers about the fate of the social network. Matt Rednor, the CEO of Decoded Advertising, predicted that plenty of the pieces that made up Google+ will spin off and make a comeback in the future.
One of the services they believe would have a great success if it would be rolled out as a separate product is Hangouts, which they deem to be a better platform for video-communication than its counterpart, FaceTime, offered by iPhone.
Google has already been making some changes by moving around some of the features previously tied up to Google+. Location sharing, for example, has been transferred to Google Hangouts, and photos storing has made a move to Google Photos.
At the same time, YouTube comments don’t appear automatically on Google+ anymore, and inside sources predict that commenters will soon be free to do their thing even if they don’t have a Google+ account.
The blog announcement included a statement where Google admitted that it made no sense for Google+ to be your supervising identity covering all your other Google products. While he praised the company’s commitment to advancing the digital realm, Ryan Fey, co-founder and senior marketing officer at Omelet, was very frank regarding Google’s mistakes with Google+.
Fey said the constant need to log into the deserted platform in order to use other services might have made plenty of its fans feel used – a feeling that clung on over the past four years. Google+ was never the platform to attract users in flocks, which is why it is a smart decision to stop shoving it down the throat of Google’s users.
There are other execs who still believe in the future of Google+, and for good reason. According to Grant Owens, chief strategy officer at Critical Mass, the service has made it really easy for the search giant to reel in a lot of valuable data, which means that Google won’t be so eager to kill anything that helps them tie user data together across services and products.
Image Source: A List Daily
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