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Ars Technica and Bloomberg are both reporting that Google+ photos is being separated from Google+ and may be rebranded (probably back to Picasa Web from whence it came).
After prying Google Hangouts out of the clutches of Google+ and backing down on their Real Name Policy analysts are starting to notice the slow dis-assembly of Google+ and the death sentence to anonymity it tried to impose.
This move comes after the departure of Vic Gundotra from his prior tenure as Google+ czar. In fact Google+ was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, a point noticed by many tech sites, and discussed here on SN.
Separating Google Photos, especially when re-combined with the free rather elegant Picasa photo management tool may put Google in a better position to compete with Yahoo!'s Flikr.
Is this really the plan, to go after Flikr?
Or is it just a realization by Google that monetizing Google+'s has been a failure, even while Google+ shows some popularity.
Or is it in fact due to the growing pushback by Google users refusing to joing Plus?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RaffArundel on Monday August 04 2014, @01:14PM
You are clearly not the target audience, and while likely a minority with hating social platforms, this does indicate where their strategy failed. Caveat: making some assumptions about their strategy which in turn may result in begging the question.
So, you (Google) want a social network. You realize you are late to the online presence (MySpace/Facebook) and status linking/tracking (Finger/Twitter). Picasa never took off - the only people I know who use it were already in the Google ecosystem. When you talk about online photos, you hear Flikr, Instagram and Pinterest not Google Photo and Picasa. What you (Google again) do have is an email infrastructure which has a strong following and a video service with a lot of publishers (and even more consumers). Additionally, you have myriad tools with various adoption rates and quality. Basically, you want to make money and someone in some meeting is going to say "monetize our cloud platforms with a unified paradigm that creates synergy for all our stakeholders" (pardon for missing some buzzwords, the bile was rising) so you create a social media czar and go to town.
Apparently, you bundle them all together into one "product". I have no idea why you don't want to be a part of Google's, mostly because there are a lot of reasons why you may want to avoid them - and some don't even require a tinfoil hat. People didn't rush to the platform (join G+), they didn't want to be held accountable (real name), they didn't abandon their preferred fractured platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Flikr, etc.) to have one unified platform.
So, would it have made a difference if Google wasn't so aggressive forcing the customers (well, their accounts) of the individual tools to merge everything into one G+ universe?