Will a New Focus for Google+ Lead to Success?

In the past years, there has been numerous of rumors that Google+ was going to be killed and no longer exist. When Google+ was first launched in 2011, I was told that it was going to be like Facebook, only much better. Its major failure was trying to compete with social media competitors like Facebook and Twitter. Google was just not able to keep up with the social media aspect of it; it never really stood a chance.

Well, after three years, Google+ is certainly not being killed, but Google has recently stated that it is planning to split the product up into three different services: Stream, Hangouts, and Photos.

Google+ is not very friendly user, it has a complicated layout for users to get used to and transition from. This is what may have pushed users away from using their site. They tried to focus the site on becoming more of a social media platform with the posting of pictures and content but the truth is that the content was weak. One of the reasons people love social media is because of its ability to share and have interesting content about basically anything all the time. All of the world’s latest news is always presented on the biggest social media platforms.

A significant change that Google made was the necessity to have a Google account in order to have a YouTube account. In my opinion this, was a great functionality change because it forced those that didn’t have a Google account to get one. However, many people weren’t too happy about that. One of the main reasons why having these two accounts linked to each other was a bad idea was because people would always stay logged in to all their personal stuff. Whether you logged into your email or YouTube account everything was easily accessible which could be a bad or good thing.With the separation of both, you will now be able to upload, comment, and create a channel with out needing a Google account. If you’re happy with everything as it is now, then you have the option to continue as if but if you want to remove your Google+ profile from your YouTube account, you’ll be able to do this in the next months.

If you’re not an active user of Google+ on a daily basis, you’re probably completely neutral or happy. For those of us that are active users of the social network part, this means that the removal of a very handy quick link to our profiles will no longer exist. I guess I can’t complain, really, because that same link is now only one additional click away. In addition to that, one of my key problems I’m having with Google is that for some reason it seems to always kill a service that you’ve been using for years and grown dependent on like Notebooks, Reader, Wave, Groups, Picasa, now plus.

Google should really figure out what consumers like and test it out before they completely change their system. I think social media for example should not be an add-on but should be at the heart of almost everything Google does. I don’t think they were wrong in the fundamentals of their vision perhaps just in their execution.