About four years ago Google+ was launched with the intentions of taking over as the go-to social network. Google seemed to have all the right ideas (almost); everyone has a Gmail, so why not offer the capability to share photos, add statuses to your stream and organize your acquaintances into specific “circles” instead of just “friends”.

Except it didn’t seem to catch on. Even after attempts of making it mandatory to have a Google+ in order to set up a Gmail account, or even comment on YouTube, people weren’t spending the amount of time they would on comparable social sites (ahem, Facebook). “In 2012 Google+ had an average visit time of just 3 minutes per month from its users, in comparison to the 405 for Facebeook users.”

So it shouldn’t have come as a shock when Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of Products, came out with this statement (ironically?) posted on his Google+.

Now, Horowitz doesn’t specifically state the demise of what we know as Google+, but seeing as Google+’s main building blocks are those two products, we are led to believe that the Google+ we know will be no more.

No future plans have been announced for their branding, but the three main features that make it up, Hangouts, Streams and Photos, will not just fall by the wayside. Sundar Pichai, Google’s Senior Vice President of Products, stated that Hangouts, which has been rolled out as a standalone app, will continue to live on while the latter are improved.

For us Google+ was always two big things: one was building a stream, the second was a social layer, a common layer of identity; how sharing works across our products and service,” said Pichai. “The stream has a passionate community of users. But the second goal was in some ways an even more important goal for us. We’ve done both, but I think we’re at a stage where use cases like photos and communications are big standalone, so we’re going to think of this as a stream first, and then photos and communications as big new areas. So internally we’re organizing ourselves to support that. You’ll see us evolve all these three areas.”

Google+ was trying too hard to be something it couldn’t, and Facebook (at least for now) still reigns supreme when it comes to the top social networks. While Google may have to add this to their list of failed attempts, they will never shy away from a challenge and we should look forward to what is to come. So this weekend when you’re enjoying the spring weather and you crack open a beer, remember to pour one out for our good friend, or maybe they were just in your acquaintance circle, Google+.