Google executive Bradley Horowitz confirmed late last night that there are some changes coming to Google+, and he has been placed in charge of two new branches of the social network.
“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”
The Photos and Streams products that he’s referencing are two components of Google+ that are being broken down into separate services.
Earlier today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior VP of products, explained the changes in more detail.
According to VentureBeat, Pichai stated Google+ is being split into what the company believes are the social networks two main components: photos and social sharing.
Google is going to focus its efforts on improving photos and social sharing by breaking them out into their own products. Hangouts will also be separated from Google+ with a renewed focus going towards that as well.
There were no details given on when we can expect these changes, or what will become of Google+ once those components have been stripped out of it, but more details will eventually surface as Google moves forward with these projects.
UPDATE:
We have since learned that Google is not separating Google+ into separate products. ‘Streams’ and ‘Photos’ refer to the names of new internal teams at Google. A Google executive clarified the misunderstanding behind this story in a comment that reads:
A lot of misunderstanding and speculation. 🙂 The internal org was renamed “Photos and Streams,” because Sundar likes org names that match what the teams do. And since our org includes Photos, Google+, Blogger, and News, there you have photos, plus several streams of content.
No big user-facing changes tied to this at all.
