Google's drive to challenge Facebook appeared to have hit a snag when it announced Monday that it is splitting Google+ from its other services such as Youtube. Google+ is the tech giant's attempt at building a social networking platform that could rival Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In a bid to introduce the service and help to propagate usage, Google+ has been integrated into other Google services as a requirement; users could only create a YouTube account, for instance, with a Google+ account.
The company seemed to have given up. Google+ never really took off, at least to the extent of the user penetration achieved by its rivals. The Wall Street Journal called it a veritable ghost town because the millions of its users only signed up and are not really doing much there. The article was published in 2012, and the case is, sadly for Google, the same today.
"Google users haven't had a choice - Google insisted that they use Google+ when they used other services," Recode explained. The failure appears to stem from the way the social network is force-fed on the users.
"Why the f-- do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video," YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim famously quipped in a Wall Street Journal report.
According to a statement on Google's blog, "When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we've needed to rethink."
So is this death for Google+? If the Google blog statement was any indication, the social network will still trundle on, although it will be more focused on "becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them."
The news, however, was welcomed with a collective sigh of relief from users and tech pundits alike. The Google+ split would mean that all Google services could now be accessed using a Google email and nothing else.
