Dave Besbris steps down as Google+ chief, Bradley Horowitz takes lead on Photos and Streams

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Dave Besbris has stepped down as Vice President of Engineering for Google+, as confirmed by Bradley Horowitz who will be running Google's Photos and Streams products.

Update: As clarified by +Yonatan Zunger of Google, "Streams" refers to a collection of products (Blogger, Google+, Google News) rather than a singular product.

The future of Google+ as we know it may not be as we thought back when the social platform launched in 2011. It looks like the platform will be split into separate products: Photos and Streams, with the future of Hangouts as we currently know and love uncertain.

After first Google+ lead +Vic Gundotra stepped down last year, +Dave Besbris took over insuring that the future of the platform is bright, so it is relatively surprising that today's news that under a year later he is to be replaced by long-time Vice President +Bradley Horowitz who will be overseeing the split of Google+, taking the lead on Google Photos and Streams.


"Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true -- I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users." - +Bradley Horowitz

 There are many questions to be asked on what exactly this means for the platform and community at large. Will Google+ be stripped of long-term features such as Photos, Hangouts, Local (development there has been stale in the past year) and others be rebranded as 'Streams' focusing purely on the home stream? That's all speculation on my part but Google+ app updates for Android in the past year has removed link ties to Hangouts, and put Photos on the back burner, displaying only a small link at the very bottom of the drop-down menu.



This may not sound like great news for us Google+ die-hards, but having these products split from Google+ may be less confusing to new users and see a stronger uptake in the long term. In hindsight, why should someone have to sign-up to Google+ in order to view and organise their photos?

Make sure to read +Sundar Pichai's interview with Forbes for more clarity on Google's current official stance on Google+, and what components of the project have been successful for the company. The idea of a common identity across all Google services has worked really well, so that is one aspect of Google+ probably won't be going away any time soon.

Google+ is changing for better or worse, and there's evidence that the transitioning has been in motion for a long time. In the coming weeks and months, we'll should hopefully see the bigger picture and of course, I, +Lee Jarratt, Editor-in-chief at +Google Plus Daily will keep you in the loop.