Hangouts and Photos are excellent services that are brought down by one major flaw: they’re both tied to Google+, that social network of Google’s that the company wants to forcibly integrate into every other service it has. Fortunately, that could all change in the near future as the company is apparently going to spin Hangouts and Photos off as separate services. This is especially significant considering how the two were some of Google+’s key features when it launched back in 2011.
Google could take the “+” out of Google+ Photos and Hangouts, establishing them as separate products worthy of individual attention. “I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications [Hangouts], photos and the Google+ stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products, told Forbes in an interview. Pichai explained that Google+ could be thought of as two concepts. One is the single sign-in platform that lets Google share your data across services like Gmail and Drive. The other is the Google+ “stream” and all the social features around it. When Google+ launched in 2011, Photos and Hangouts were pitched as key features of the social networking component. It sounds like that’s going to change, though some of the work is already done. Hangouts is already a separate app on iOS and Android, and on web browsers you can access Hangouts features in Gmail. Photos is still bundled with the Google+ app, letting you automatically back up photos from your phone, but the focus has shifted away from Google+ sharing. You can now share backed up photos over Gmail instead of the social network, and perhaps we’ll see Google Drive integration down the road.
