Google has relaunched Google+ around users’ interests.
The Internet giant said it has redesigned Google+ to focus on its Communities and Collections features, which the company introduced earlier this year. Communities is a groups feature for people with like-minded interests and Collections groups posts by topics such as surfing or antique watches.
“We’ve spent a lot of time listening to what people using Google+ had to say. There were two features they kept coming back to: Communities, which now average 1.2 million new joins per day, and Collections, which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster,” Eddie Kessler, director of streams, wrote in a post.[related-posts]
Google+ in its current incarnation is far less ambitious than the vision that sparked it. Google launched Google+ four years ago with the goal of creating a social layer across its products. But it struggled to gain traction.
Google already removed Hangouts and Photos from Google+. In July, Google told users they would no longer need a Google+ account to engage with others on Google products.
“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,” Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of streams, photos and sharing, said at the time.
