After the launch of the new Photos app developed by Google in May, the tech giant announced that Google Plus photos is shutting down. The company recently made an announcement stating that the photos section in its struggling social network will start to shut down on August 1. Initially, the company will shut down the Android version and then the Web and iOS ones.
Google said that this comes as an effort to make sure that everyone has the best photos experience possible the company can provide and even after the Google Plus photos will be shut down, the media files belonging to its users will remain safely on its servers. The photos will be accessible online or for export with the use of Google Takeout.
Google Plus has never been successful and even though the company has a huge database of users, the social network was never a serious competition for others in the lines of Twitter, Instagram and particularly Facebook. Edward Morbius estimated in January 2015 that only around 9 percent of all the users registered on the social network have posted content actively on the website. He believes that no more than 0.3 percent of all the profiles on Google+ made a post in January 2015. This means that just around 4 to 6 million users posted on the platform in the first month in 2015.
The shutdown of Google Plus photos was expected. Bradley Horowitz, the man who oversees the platform, made an announcement when Google Photos launched that Google was searching for what users believe to be good about Google Photos and concentrate on those things. He added that the company also looked to move aside from products that could be independent, such as photos, and eliminate the things that simply don’t work on the platform.
Google Photos has received numerous good reviews from commentators and journalists because of its very powerful image recognition capabilities and organizational functions. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Google is currently focusing its efforts on what actually works.
Horowitz claims that the platform is not dead. In May he said that Google Plus has more signs of life in it than it ever did before. However, he did add that people will definitely see a significant shift in what the platform is becoming.
Image Source: taylormadesocialmedia.co.uk
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