Google+ Is Still Struggling Three Years Later

Three years ago today, Google rolled out its Facebook competitor called Google+. Three years later, it would be tough to say it's really a true competitor.

Google+ has some perks, but for the most part, it has failed to gain quite the traction it was looking for.

Google's numbers are somewhat misleading at times, since a bunch of its products automatically create a Google+ account for you. Google claims to have 540 million monthly active Google+ users, but only half of those users actually visit the social network, according to The New York Times.

But even if these users aren't actively using Google+, it creates a simple way for Google to track users across Gmail, YouTube, and Maps.

As of October 2013, Google+ had 300 million monthly active users on the social platform, according to Re/code. At the same time, Forrester found only 22% of online adults visit Google+ at least monthly.

Last month, the head of Google+ Vic Gundotra jumped ship, which wasn't a great sign for the platform. This led TechCrunch to report that Google may be reorganizing Google+ and shifting around the 1,000 to 1,200 employees working on Google+, hinting at a new definition of the social platform. The thought is that Google would strip down Google+ into separate services for video chatting, instant messaging, and photo storage.

And users seem to be loving the photo tool on Google+, so this could possibly work out well. The tool lets you store your photos in albums that are automatically organized and edited by Google's algorithms. Google Hangouts is also a fantastic alternative to Skype. It's just that Google+ as a social network never quite took off.

Some reports even hint to Google possibly disbanding the platform in the near future. Developers who had been using Google+ log in on their sites reported they saw an option to sign in with Google instead of Google+. Google's response was that they're always testing things, but who knows what will happen to the Google+ login.

Another telling sign is that Google made no mention of Google+ in its annual developers conference I/O. Nonetheless, Larry Page is still trying to convince us that Google+ is still alive and kicking.

"The service has been growing tremendously," Page told The New York Times. "People are always like, 'Oh, what's going on?' But for us, we're super excited about it because it's a big service, growing continuously, since we launched it, at a high rate, and we're making it better and better every day."