Google, the Alphabet-owned tech behemoth doesn’t seem to be ready to part ways with its home-brewed social network — Google+. The company has today announced via a blogpost that Google+ is now being added as a ‘core part’ to the business-focused offerings clubbed under the ‘Apps for Work’ service(which might soon be renamed to Google Cloud).
Google Plus is now treading the same route which their primary messaging application Hangouts took a couple months ago. The company has reiterated the fact that Hangouts is now being focused on business use, with the launch of new consumer-facing products Allo and Duo. And it now believes that Google+ is not for use by an average user.
Defining a solid future for the dying social networking platform, the official blogpost reads:
Engaging people is key to innovation, and many Google Apps for Work domains have found Google+ to be an invaluable tool that helps drive active engagement and cultivate innovative ideas from all levels of the organization.
Starting today, Google+ is now a core Google Apps for Work service when used within a domain. This means that Google+ will have the same technical support and service level commitments as any other core service, like Gmail or Google Drive.
The company has recently given the Google+ interface a complete overhaul, to focus more on communities and collections based on specific topics(or preferences). This move away from the social network, as the tech giant likes to put it, ‘make life easier for you’. The Communities are still growing with an average of 1.2 million new joins per day, whereas Collections, which launched about an year ago is ‘growing even faster’.
With the addition of this service to the core offerings(no longer a part of the additional services list) of the ‘Work’ portfolio leads to some minor differences when compared to the public version. Google for Work users will have to use the refreshed material design look, and wouldn’t have the option to revert to the older UI. They’ll also have to switch to the latest Google+ applications on their smartphones to support the change introduced today.
In addition to this, domain-restricted content and activity will be handled and monitored as per the guidelines specified in the agreement. Google+ being a unique proposition with its community and collection features could be helpful for businesses, and could be pitted against the likes of Facebook for Work — a modified version of Facebook for workplaces.
By making Google+ the newest core service for Google Apps, Google+ will now provide the support and guaranteed SLAs that businesses need,
reads the official announcement.
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Google+ Collections have been around since May of 2015.