As Google buys photo and video storage app Odysee, rumours are beginning to swirl that the search giant is about to overhaul Google Plus.
With 300 million active users and over 500 million people registered, Google’s social media network Google Plus is actually doing far better than Twitter (200 million active users). But considering the amount of articles proclaiming that the service is dead, you wouldn’t know it. While Facebook is used for sharing holiday snaps and Twitter is used for sharing details about your lunch, Google Plus is predominantly used for professional networking (sort of like a more public version of LinkedIn) and its lack of appeal to young people means it gets a bad rep.
In fact, Google Plus is doing so well that Google wants to launch its popular Google+ Photos feature as a standalone service. How do we know this? Because they’ve just bought Odysee, an iOS and Android app that lets its users backup photos taken on their mobile devices and save them on their home computers.
A statement on Odysee’s website explains:
“We are excited to share that the Odysee Platform Team will be joining the Google+ Team. Odysee’s vision was to be the easiest way for everyone to capture unlimited memories and access them everywhere. We are very excited to join Google where we’ll continue to focus on building amazing products that people love.
Our deepest thanks to every one of our users. To help you with the transition, the Odysee service will continue till Feb 23rd and soon after that all your photos and videos will be available as a downloadable archive.”
According to reports, Odysee will gift Google+ Photos with more offline capabilities. Odysee explains that it is “especially designed for people who take a lot of videos and would like the option of saving them at their full quality” so we fully expect that (at least) to be one of the upcoming features.
As Google+ Photos already stores all of your videos online, in one place, but as people grow wary of just how much data Google stores on us (and they store a lot) this will keep them under Google’s wing but will give them more privacy and more peace of mind. Furthermore, Google wants to compete with Instagram, Facebook and Dropbox which all encourage users to save their images online and this will certainly help them do it.
Source: TechCrunch, Odysee
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