According to Sundar Pichai, the head of products at Google, hinted during an interview with Forbes that two of Google+’s best integrations, Hangouts and Photos, will continue to separate from the core social network. “I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications, photos and the Google+ Stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area,” he told the magazine.
While both Hangouts and Photos have separate apps on mobile, they’re inextricably linked to Google+ in the way users register for the former and navigate through the latter. Increasingly, Photos has become a product that users interact with entirely apart from Google+, and Hangouts lives, for many people, on mobile.
Google has said many times that Google+ is not only a success in terms of user interaction, but it is increasingly the backbone of the entire company, with many services, such as YouTube, dependent on the social network’s login information.
With Google I/O less than three months away, we’ll likely hear more about the future of Photos, Hangouts, and Google+, in San Francisco.
[source]Forbes[/source]
