Google has confirmed that it its taking its troubled social network in a new direction, splitting Photos off from the rest.
In an interview last week, Google’s Sundai Pichai confirmed that his company was thinking of splitting the lumbering Google+ into separate elements.
“I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications [Hangouts], photos and the Google+ stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area,” he told Forbes.
Now the company has confirmed the first move in this process. Bradley Horowitz has been made the new head of Google+, and has taken to the underpopulated social network to confirm the service’s split into separate “Photos” and “Streams” components.
Horowitz takes over from David Besbris, who had been in charge of Google+ for less than a year.
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It’s not yet apparent what Google intends to do with the third strand of Google+, which Pichai called communications, but which we all know as Hangouts.
As Cnet point out, back in December, Horowitz himself spoke about Hangouts and its wide-ranging nature. “It’s texting, it’s telephony, it’s one-to-one, it’s many-to-many, it’s consumer, it’s enterprise,” he said. “We’re trying to do something broader that helps people communicate wherever they are using whatever products they prefer.”
In Pichai’s interview, he claimed that the company would continue to “invest in and evolve” Hangouts, whilst emphasising that the company was happy to support the success of WhatsApp and its ilk.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
