02 Mar Google+ Is Poised For A Big Breakup
Some major restructuring is going on at Google+, and it looks like it’s the end of the social network as we know it—if that label was ever appropriate in the first place. Long-time Google VP Bradley Horowitz has announced that he’s taking the management reins from David Besbris and splitting Google+ into separate services called Photos and Streams at the same time.
For the moment, details on exactly what that means are thin on the ground. Photos is fairly obviously the image taking, editing and sharing elements of Google+, but Streams is something new: It’s apparently the river of Google+ posts that’s going to be left when everything else has been stripped out. (Hangouts will live on as a standalone messaging/video-conferencing service, although Horowitz won’t be managing it.)
“It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users,” Horowitz wrote in his post, which gives you some indication of how Google will spin this when it finally gets around to making an official announcement.