GOOGLE: The Team Building Our Social Network Has Never Been Bigger - We're In This 'For The Long Haul'

The new top exec of Google+, David Besbris, insists the social network's team isn't dwindling since long-time leader Vic Gundotra stepped down in April.

Besbris, in an interview with Re/code's Kurt Wagner, says, on the contrary, the Google+ team is actually the largest it's ever been and that the company's in social "for the long haul."

In an April article called "Google+ Is Walking Dead," TechCrunch said employees on the Hangouts and Photos teams would be leaving G+ to join Android, and that Google was starting to think of Google+ as more of a platform than a product, ending its competition with Facebook or Twitter.

But Besbris says Google+ isn't going away any time soon though.

"The company is behind it," he says. "I have no idea where these rumors come from, to be honest with you."

He also says G+ was never trying to compete with Facebook, anyway.

"I think people come to Google+ with this expectation that it's going to be Google's attempt to do some other product - we're doing this to compete with somebody and it must be something like that," he told Wagner. "That's not actually how we compete with products. We don't go into [certain] industries because somebody else is doing something important. We go in because we want to make users happy, because we see some software out there that's scratching some itches."

He ended the interview by saying that Google doesn't think that there's "an end game" for Google+ and that the company is in social for the long haul.

Read the rest of the Re/code interview here.