Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+
Google Inc. (GOOG) is planning to give its photo service more autonomy from its Google+ social network as the company looks to attract more users, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's report — still unconfirmed by Google — lands two days after Hangouts began working without a Google+ account and joined Google Apps for Business with an SLA, making Photos the second major product reportedly being cut loose from the network. The pickup was broad: eight outlets including The Verge, CNET, Ars Technica and VentureBeat ran the same story on or about August 1, 2014, signaling how closely the industry is watching Google unwind the forced-Google+ logins it imposed in earlier years.
First-order effects
- If the plan holds, Google+ loses what is widely seen as its strongest engagement hook — photo storage and sharing — while the photo service gains room to court users who never signed up for the social network.
- Google's stated motive, per the people cited by Bloomberg, is user growth: decoupling removes the signup friction that has suppressed adoption of the photo tools.
Second-order effects
- A standalone Google photo product would put direct pressure on Flickr, Apple's iCloud Photo Library and Dropbox's carousel-style apps in consumer photo storage, where bundling with a social graph has been Google's differentiator.
- Each service Google peels away from Google+ weakens the network's role as a mandatory identity layer, forcing Google to decide what Google+ is actually for once Hangouts and Photos no longer require it.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward Google abandoning the 2011-2013 strategy of bootstrapping a social network through product integration, in favor of letting each service compete on its own merits — a structural retreat whose endpoint for Google+ itself remains unresolved.
- For the broader industry, it is another data point that utility services (messaging, photos) win users as standalone products faster than as features of a social network, raising the bar for any platform that mandates cross-product accounts.
The trend: Google is methodically unbundling its products from Google+ — Hangouts first, Photos reportedly next — reversing its forced-integration era service by service.