After several years of deafening user complaints, Google has decided to separate Google+ from YouTube. Starting “soon,” users of the latter will no longer need a Google+ account to upload a video or create a channel. Perhaps more importantly, those that use the service to simply watch videos will not need a Google+ account to comment on a video, and, even if they do have a Google+ account, their YouTube comments won’t appear on the social network.
According to Google, YouTube is just the first of the many services that will be separated from Google+. Moreover, the company says it provide people with a way to remove their Google+ account in the next couple of weeks.
Following the announcement, Senior Vice President of Streams, Photos and Sharing Bradley Horowitz took to Google+ to explain the decision in a post called Everything in its Right Place. “I’ve concluded that it’s time for a “pivot”… or more precisely time to talk more openly about a pivot that’s been underway for some time (and in fact is reflected in the name of the new team),” he says. “We’re going to continue focusing Google+ on helping users connect around the interest they love, and retire it as the mechanism by which people share and engage within other Google products.”
Horowitz goes on to add that the company originally envisioned Google+ as something that it would use to unify sharing across its disparate services. A goal he characterizes as “well-intentioned,” but one that ultimately led to many less than ideal user interactions. For instance, he says “Integration with YouTube implied that leaving a comment on YouTube (something users had obviously been doing successfully for years) suddenly and unexpectedly required “joining Google+.”
We will probably have to wait until the end of the year to see the full consequences of this decision, but already some users are expressing concern that Google+ will go the way of the company’s ill-fated RSS reader.
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