Google Revamps Plus by Focusing on Communities & Collections

Google has given a much-needed upgrade to its not-so-well performing Google+ social network. The company is focusing on shared interests, communities and collections. The new social network is more mobile-friendly, and attempts to provide a better user experience than ever before.

After the site started in June 2011, many changes have been set in motion due to changing behavior of an average user. Google+ no longer features shared circles, and has changed user privileges to not make the Google+ profile as the main identity. Youtube commenting is disabled, and the Photos service was removed completely due to popular demand.  

Google released Google+ communities back in 2012, competing directly with Facebook Groups. On average, around 1.2 million users join a community every day. Collections, released in May of 2015, gives users the ability to share content on cards and share them on various boards on the website. The feature is a combination of concepts pioneered by Pinterest and Facebook.

Google has redesigned the site completely, streamlining how a user posts, searches, connects, and follows people & various topics. The website portrays a similar user experience across all devices, regardless of screen. Although this was the case in the past, the user experience differed from device to device. An interesting thing to note is that the platform runs on Material Design, the programming language developed for the Android platform.

Luke Wroblewski, Product Director at Google and founder of Polar, had this to say: “Where it shines today, it’s actually pretty amazing. Topics like astrophotography, British dragonflies, crochet, Disc Golf Pro Tips, Earthquakes. The topics of conversation span from niche to broad. Communities were first introduced in 2012 in hopes to cancel out the need for discussion groups…including Google’s own Groups product. It succeeded. Collections are a bit newer, having been introduced earlier this year. It has also been successful and dovetailed with the Communities product nicely.”

Users can choose whether to adopt the new design by clicking “Let’s Go”, or can choose to stay with the classic Google+ design. New updates and changes will continually roll out over the next coming months. Updated applications for the Android and iOS platform will release over the coming week.

Google+ has over 2.2 Billion users, with an estimated 90% users having never posted anything on the social network. In comparison, Facebook has over 1 Billion daily active users.