14 DAY TRIAL // Google has taken another step towards making Google+ less and less relevant in its portfolio, removing the Google+ link from the name of logged-in users.
What previously appeared as "+Username" and pointed towards the user's Google+ profile page is now just "Username" and raw text.
While this change initially only affected Gmail and Google Search pages, the change to the header is now permanent for all Google services.
The Google+ link is not entirely gone, but now resides in the Apps menu which opens as a drop-down panel right next to the user's name.
Google+ is not dead, we already know this
Only last week, Bradley Horowitz, Google's vice president of Photos, Streams, and Sharing, has confirmed in an interview that the service is not shutting down, but merely transforming and adapting to its current userbase.
This makes more sense than rumors of the service being shut down since the company invested quite a lot of manpower and brand awareness to openly acknowledge defeat like this.
People never quite understood Google+ from the beginning, mainly because it looked like Google was forcing it down their throats and only managed to garner the attention of a dedicated tech crowd.
The Google+ menu has also been changed
Google+ Photos has already been moved to Google Photos at this year's Google I/O conference, and today changes were also made to the Google+ menu, where the Google+ Photos link now redirects to the user's Google Photos dashboard.
We expect to see more such actions in the future, with Google toning down the Google+ push it was on for the past years.
The service's future is assured for now, but we are currently seeing Google+ in its last days as a full social networking portal, with more features expected to be branched out on their own. We're looking at you, Hangouts!!!
