The oft-mocked Google+ is getting stripped of features that will be incorporated elsewhere into the Googleverse. Google has decided to “move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+,” according to a post on its official blog today.
That includes Google+ Photos elements being phased into the Photos app, and location sharing will be moved to Hangouts. What’s more, over at the YouTube blog, it was revealed that YouTube comments and Google+ comments will no longer be linked. Plus, other YouTube activities, like creating a channel, will no longer require a Google+ profile.
“While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink,” Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Streams, Photos, and Sharing, said in the post.
Google’s social network has been criticised and made fun of since its early days, shortly after it was launched in 2011 — even by Google employees. The service’s streamlining might strike some critics as long overdue.
[Google blog, YouTube blog and TheNextWeb]