What actually Google Plus is ?
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus /ˈɡuːɡəl plʌs/) is a social network and social layer for google services that is owned and operated by Google Inc.
Google+ launched in June 2011 as a social network. Features included the ability to post photos and status updates to the stream or interest based communities, group different types of relationships (rather than simply "friends") into Circles, a multi-person instant messaging, text and video chat called Hangouts, events, location tagging, and the ability to edit and upload photos to private cloud-based albums.
Google executives subsequently described Google+ as "a social layer across all of Google's services", allowing them to share a user's identity and interests.
Approximately 540 million monthly active users make use of the social layer by interacting with Google+'s enhanced properties, like Gmail, +1 button, and YouTube comments. Some 300 million monthly active users participate in the social network, interacting with the Google+ social networking stream. But user engagement has been relatively low, averaging around 7 minutes per user per month.
HISTORY
Creation
Google+ is considered the company's fourth foray into social networking, following Google Buzz (launched 2010, retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, retired by March 1, 2012) and Orkut (launched in 2004, as of 2013 operated entirely by subsidiary Google Brazil - retired in September 2014[12]).
Growth, Engagement
Between 2011 and 2012, the number of active users on Google+ grew significantly, but the average time those users spent on the site was a small fraction of that on comparable social media services. Moreover, Google+ growth stats are difficult to evaluate because Google first defined the service as a social network, then later as "a social layer across all of Google's services", allowing them to share a user's identity and interests. According to Ars Technica, Google+ signups are "often just an incidental byproduct of signing up for other Google services."In private beta, Google+ reached 10 million users just two weeks after the launch. In a month, it reached 25 million. In October 2011, the service reached 40 million users, according to Larry Page. Based on ComScore, the biggest market was the United States followed by India. After nearly three months of operation, it hit 50 million users, whereas other social networking sites such as MySpace took 1,046 days to reach that level; Twitter 1,096 days; Facebook 1,325 days; and LinkedIn 2,354 days .By the end of the year Google+ had 90 million users. According to Experian Hitwise, an Internet metrics firm, the number of U.S. visits to Google+ surpassed 49 million during the one-month period ending December 11, 2011, a 55% increase from the one-month period ending November 11, 2011. According to independent analysis of its growth in December 2011, the site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a day.
In just under a day in July 2011, the Google+ iPhone app became the most popular free application in the Apple App Store.
But user engagement did not keep pace. ComScore estimated that users averaged just 3.3 minutes on the site in January 2012, versus 7.5 hours for Facebook. In March 2013, average time spent on the site remained low: roughly 7 minutes, according to Nielsen, not including traffic via apps.In February 2014, The New York Times likened Google+ to a ghost town, citing Google stats of 540 million "monthly active users", but noting that almost half don't visit the site. The company replied that the significance of Google+ was less as a Facebook competitor than as a means of gathering and connecting user information from Google's various services.
Management changes
In April 2014, Vic Gundotra, the executive in charge of Google+, departed the company with management responsibility going to David Besbris. On March 1, 2015, Google executive Bradley Horowitz posted that he had taken over Google’s Photos and Streams products, leaving the status of Google+ (which he didn't mention by name) unclear. The week before, Sundar Pichai, Google senior vice president of products, told Forbes that the company would "focus on communications, photos and the Google+ Stream" as three areas, rather than a single one under the Google+ umbrella. In a March 2nd post, Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger wrote that "Streams" refers to Google-provided streams of content, including Google+, Blogger, and News.
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