Google+ Photos To Be Separated From Google+

An anonymous reader writes "Speculation on the eventual shuttering of Google+ has once more risen with news that Google+ Photos will soon be developed and run separately from the social media site. This news follows observations that Google+ "was barely mentioned at Google I/O 2014, while there were 15 sessions dedicated to the service in 2013" and that the company has ended its controversial real name policy. Google Hangouts was also separated from Google+ at the end of July." I've actually heard several people praising Google+ lately; scaling it back to "just a social stream" probably fits into some kind of corollary to Murphy's Law.

Its all about getting an accurate head counts.

[Bob_Who]

Google needed to sort out users versus user accounts. They had to distiguish all of the duplicate human beings, as separate from their various accounts. The high value data is gmail storage, google docs, and especially picasa web albums. Google sites hosted my web site experiments, and docs and forms, cloud stored my binaries, and voice relayed to my phone numbers, wallet, etc etc. The process of attempting to force feed Google+ to me, though futile, still accomplished their primary objective: It functioned to consolidate my multiple user ids and to figure out what I claim is the meaningful data.

While Google+ is a marketing fail, it was a database validation success, while also changing the overall TOS. This process unified various random accounts to identify the actual user. It combined the data of browsing habits, purchases, phone numbers, handles, ips, mac addresses, adress books, etc. They were all mined and combined to fully implicate individuals accessing anything Google. The fact is, that until all of this Google+ bullshit, I had quietly tucked away thousands of photographs which filled several accounts to the brink. The process of contending with the change forced me to access everything which eliminated the redundancy of me as multiple users. Now Google can be sure its all one of me, which they knew all along, but this just confirms my usage profile and actual breathing existence. I'm not worth as much money to advertisers if I am a redundant user already counted and sold. Just one of me is their assurance to clients so there's no double dipping on real head count. I feel so special, like social currency of unique importance to statistical metrics....