For the past 2 ½ years Google has made it mandatory to sign up for their social network if you want to use any of their other services. Even if you never visited the Google+ page, you still had an account if you signed up for gMail, Google Docs or even YouTube.
Finally, however, Google has added a ‘no thanks’ option when signing up for a new account. There was no official announcement about the change, but Google has confirmed it has taken place. What type of impact this will have on Google’s already struggling social network is not yet clear, but it will obviously have fewer users signing up going forward.
Google may have realized that it doesn’t help the social network’s reputation to simply have millions of people sign up, and then be entirely inactive. In fact, this could have been having the opposite effect that they desired.
Google will still be recommending that people sign up for Google+ with other accounts, but the fact that it is no longer required is welcome news to many.
While this change will undoubtedly begin many rumors that Google is going to shut Google+ down, I very much doubt that is the case. It seems to me that Google is simply realizing that they aren’t going to overtake Facebook (or even Twitter) as the social network of choice by forcing people to sign up. They will need to develop a long term (10+ years) strategy that can help them to bring in new and active members.
This will likely be done by continuing to improve their already helpful and popular products like Google+ Hangouts and others.
