Is a recent move by Google a hint at its social network s future? The company is longer requiring new Gmail users to sign up for Google+.
In a statement to the Telegraph, Google said the signup experience was changed earlier this month. The move comes after a couple of years of the company pushing the social network as a centerpiece for its varied online services.
As the Mercury News reported over the summer, the future of 3-year-old Google+ is up in the air after the departure of its chief, Vic Gundotra. David Besbris, a Google engineering vice president who took over Google+, told the Merc: No, Google isn t giving up on Google+. Besides going after social-networking king Facebook, Google+ also serves to unify the information Google collects about its users. In other words, all the better to target ads with, my dear.
But the company s latest move appears to be a step back from Google+ and is likely to affect the social network s user numbers, which the company said last year was 540 million monthly active users. By comparison, Facebook is said to have more than 1.2 billion users.
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