The social network site Google Plus announces new changes. The site has been around for 4 years, but it hasn’t had as much success than anticipated upon it’s creation. It was originally created to rival the likes of social media giants Twitter and Facebook. But unfortunately the route that Google went about creating a popular social media network didn’t work in it’s favour; they almost forced Google and YouTube users to be part of Google Plus when they didn’t want to. You had to create an account in order to just comment on a YouTube video, or make a YouTube channel. This caused a lot of backlash from users, but yet they still had to make an account so they could access the content they wanted.
Although they reported on up to 540 million users, less than half were actually active on the site itself. It seems as though the process of actually changing Google Plus and everything around it, already begun back in May when Google announced their Google Photos App that has all the popular photos tools from Google Plus all in one app. They changed the login details on the Photos App so you don’t need a Plus account to access it or set it up. They’re also offering an easier change for the public profiles on Google Plus if users don’t want them to be public anymore. As well as telling users that they don’t need to worry about their normal Google accounts being public or followed.
They’ve announced these changes as of the 27th July 2015, and report that these will be put into place over the next few months but it’s going to take a while to do so. I think that this new change for Google will benefit them hugely, they weren’t successful with Google Plus, but the introduction of Google Photos could be massively popular with their consumers.
