Google to remove Google+ from YouTube and other products
Google announced today that it made the decision to untie the bond between its social networking service Google+ and YouTube. In addition, Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photo and Sharing mentioned on the official Google Blog that the company would make additional changes to how content is shared, how Google users communication and how company services are used.
Comments on the video hosting and streaming site YouTube no longer require a Google+ account as of today.
This means a couple of things. First, comments made on YouTube won't show up on Google+ anymore. Second, YouTube won't require a Google+ account anymore if you want to use publishing features on the site. In particular, a Google+ account won't be required anymore to create a channel, and the dreaded "update your channel to comment" message on the site will go away as well.
Users may even remove the Google+ profile from their YouTube account but are advised not to do so right now as the feature has not been implemented yet. This means that users will delete their channel if they do it right now. Google plans to make an announcement when the option becomes available.
Google removed Google+ in one way or another from several of its products in the past, Photos for instance became a dedicated application just recently and the service lots its prominent place in the main Google toolbar on many of the company's service websites.
While YouTube is the first Google service to receive the treatment, the company made it clear that it plans to remove Google+ from other services as well.
So in the coming months, a Google Account will be all you’ll need to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel and more, all across Google.
There won't be much left of Google+ after the cleansing and one question that may come to mind is whether Google plans to abandon the service in the future. It would not be the first product of the company to receive the treatment, considering that previous social networking products such as Google Buzz or Orkut received it as well.
The new core of Google+ will be the product website where users share articles, ideas and information. It remains to be seen how successful Google+ will be on its own without the push it received from its deep integration with other Google products.
Now You: Is Google+ dead?
I feel as though they are trying far to hard to compete with Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. They want to become that all encompassing multi-tool. The problem is like most multi tools they wind up being good for only one or two things while the other 15 bells and whistles wind up being extraneous, in the way, and largely useless. Sort of good at one thing and terrible at the rest.
Google+ is one of those platform that we were drag into for improvement of the business but final users don’t really use them. I believe google+ came a few year to late and didn’t offer anything new compare to platforms like Facebook. It’s a really hard social media platform to understand, you don’t know if it’s for business to business or to share photos with you Gmail contacts. Google should just take it back to the drawing board and come up with something meaningful but stablish what it is for.
Not every corner of a business need be profitable for one to contribute to the overall profit of the business through brand enhancement. I hope Google keeps this in mind when considering pulling the plug on Google+ altogether. There remains a lot of useful contact points within it that I would hate to see disappear.
This gives me hope that they will bring back Google Reader :D
Ironically, I see Google+ existing as a niche service for the small community of IT pros and other techie types who have made it their home. Which is pretty much what Reader was before they ditched it in favour of G+.
The difference is that Reader started as a solid product that people found useful, and it was the users who built a community around it. G+ started with an empty community and tried every trick in the book to force users into it. Unfortunately internet users are a lot like cats – it’s very hard to herd them into somewhere they don’t want to go.
G+ is OK. Hated mandatory G+ for comments in extn/app/Yotube etc
Good riddance.
I hate Google+ I have never used it and I will never use it
I hate it as well but I find a few sites of mine within the last few months have suddenly adapted it as a login requirement. Why don’t the scrap the idea and simply buy out Facebook… lol… image that Google buying out Facebook… iPhone users would be screwed lol…
Finally! G+ was born dead. I haven’t commented any YT video for years. I hope I’ll be able to do it again without G+ trash. Thanks for the info!
The limits of integration appear when the commandment fails. Google+ was a risk. The army removed the commander’s prerogatives, people will follow the army and forget the Commander. Likely.
The road to Google+’s sunset begins.
G+ is very much alive.
Many Android apps and ROMs have active communities there.
Theres also country specific and hobby specific communities all with daily activity.
G+ is useful to me.
I actually really like Google+ and by the plethora of people here stating they hate it, is the one primary reason I love it. It offers a unique exclusivity deal to those of us who use it frequently, a programming group is actually a group of programmers, and not some guy asking how to write a program to crash a xbox server.
Y’all keep on hating, it makes it quiet and nice :-)
@Ryan
Too bad Google abhors “quiet and nice”. Enjoy it while it lasts. ;-)
How much activity you are experiencing on G+ has little to do with it’s life pulse, i’m afraid. If a product isn’t profitable, and in the case of G+ is likely bleeding money, Google will kill it, as they have done with lots of other projects.
I think there are a lot of clues pointing to it being shut down, probably in the next couple of years.
G+ was built to take on Facebook, and got utterly crushed by it. Google thought they could leverage their other products to basically force G+’s popularity, and they thought wrong.
Meanwhile, MySpace is still alive.
Google kills something I didn’t want to begin with? The hell you say!
“Comments on the video hosting and streaming site YouTube no longer require a Google+ account as of today.”
Hmm. This doesn’t seem to be the case for me. I haven’t commented on youtube since they made G+ a requirement to do so (years ago). After reading this, I just went to comment on a video, and upon attempting to do this, I was greeted with a popup window informing me that I needed to “set up your channel to begin commenting”.
On the side of that window, it said doing so would give me a G+ account. This is the exact same behavior I’ve seen since they started this G+/youtube integration nonsense.
From what i’ve read elsewhere, the only thing changed on youtube today is that your youtube comments won’t also appear on your G+ page (and vice versa). But best I can tell, a G+ account is still required if you want to comment on youtube.
Perhaps I’m missing something, and I’d be elated if I could once again comment on youtube without a G+ account being created for me, which I refuse to do.
I got the same thing. Thanks for pointing this out. Maybe Google is slow-rolling this but I think you’re right that they’ve only removed the crossposting of comments to G+, not the requirement for G+.
I hope Google+ will be dead soon. And I also hope that Google will realize that not every one of their ideas is a good idea…
Google+ was always dead. Only thing more useless is AOL with firefox a close second.
Firefox, savior of the Web: because of Firefox We have safe, free and open Web
Well not quite. Firefox is gaining share again.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/01/ie-falls-below-55-market-share-as-chrome-and-firefox-gain/
I will finally be able to leave a comment on a youtube video again.
Wished they would have left it alone to begin with.
yay! we did it! Bob’s army won!
░░░░░███████ ]▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
▂▄▅█████████▅▄▃▂ ☻/
██████████████████] /▌
◥⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙◤… / \
don’t look so serious Martin. I almost feel guilty.
Peter, you are an artist, even if a tank is not a flower :) Seriously said! (humor is definitely a serious matter).
Praise the Lord!
Amen! Amen!
Better late than never!
Next, they need to remove G+ account requirement to rate/comment on apps from the Play store! I have used a lot of apps on Android but have not been able to rate or comment about apps since Google instituted the G+ requirement.