Google+ gets surprise makeover

Google+ appears to have been given a second lease on life despite rumours of its imminent demise in July this year

Google's director of streams, Eddie Kessler, said the company has reimagined Google+ with a focus on its communities and collections features, the social network's most popular tools.

Communities was introduced to Google+ in late 2012, as a way of bringing together people interested in discussing particular topics or events.

The collections feature allows people to group posts by topic for their Home streams.

Kessler claimed the tools are bucking the trend of what has otherwise been derided as a moribund social platform, with communities is seeing on average 1.2 million new members a day, and collections growing even faster.

From today, Google+ has been redesigned so that communities and collections are the focus of the user experience, with a more prominent spot just under the home link on the social network's navigation bar.

Google product director Luke Wroblewski said staffers from the online giant had visited Google+ fans in their homes to find out how and why they use the social network.

According to Wroblewski, most Google+ enthusiasts just wanted someone to talk about their shared interests.

Users have been invited to opt-in to a trial of the reimagined social network.

Google will release updated Google+ apps for Android and Apple iOS too over the coming days.

The reboot comes after an announcement in July this year by Google's vice-president of streams, Bradley Horowitz, that appeared to signal that the social network would be wound-up as it had been unable to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Google removed the need for users to have a Google+ profile to share content, communicate with contacts and other features, and some features such as Photos were moved out of Google+.

However figures from the Statista portal in August this year suggested Google+ was the same size as Instagram with 300 million active users out out of 2.5 billion who have signed up for it, and slightly smaller than Twitter with 316 million users.

Facebook is the largest social network with 1.49 billions users around the world, followed by China's QQ with 832 million.