Whatever happened to Google+? ‘We’re working on it,’ Sundar Pichai says

Today at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Googlers said nothing about its social network, Google+. There are no conference sessions about Google+, either. The same thing happened at last year’s Google I/O.

The social network has undergone a few changes in the past few months. Google introduced Collections and quietly removed the Google+ Shared Collections feature, and Google+ has essentially been divided into separate products, Photos and Streams. But you can still access it, of course.

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When I ran into Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Android, Chrome, and Apps at Google, after the keynote, I couldn’t help but ask him about the fate of Google+.

“We are working on it,” Pichai told VentureBeat. “… You will hear more about it later this year.”

Google+ first launched in June 2011.

Today Google+ shared — on its Google+ page, naturally — some lessons learned about Google+:

As we continue to focus Google+ on helping you connect with people around the stuff you love, it’s become clear that while social networks are great for sharing images and video clips, they’re not where most people want to store all their private, personal photos and videos.

And sure enough, in today’s I/O keynote, one of the biggest announcement was Google Photos, a product completely divorced from Google+ that offers free storage for an unlimited number of pictures. You can share the photos out to other, more popular social networks, like Facebook and Twitter.

It’s a big step, but clearly there’s more for Google to do with Google+.

To view all of VentureBeat’s Google I/O coverage, click here.