Is Google's New Photo Service The Final Nail In Google+'s Coffin?

Google Inc GOOG GOOGL is rumored to be developing a new service that will make it easier to share photos online.

According to Bloomberg, the new service will not be part of the Google+ social network. Instead, search engine giant will allow users to post images to the world's largest social network, Facebook Inc FB. More than 1.4 billion people used Facebook every month during the first quarter.

Twitter Inc TWTR, which is also expected to be supported by Google's new photo service, had more than 300 million monthly active users during the same period.

"[This service] certainly means what they're gonna try to do is intercept some of the activity between the user and other social networks," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, told Benzinga."Maybe it's a defensive move with ad revenue moving to those networks."

Enderle said the key part is how Google decides to monetize this venture.

"It doesn't necessarily mean that Google+ is dead," he added. "But they've got a plan B in case it is dead."

The Associated Press reported that Google+ had 540 million MAUs in October 2013, but noted that most of them might only have chosen to watch a YouTube clip while logged in. By January 2015, Google had amassed an impressive 2.2 billion Google+ profiles, but only 9 percent (19.8 million) had posted content publicly.

Related Link: Google Gives Twitter The 'Broadest Audience Possible'

'What's Google+?'

Cody Willard, chairman of Scutify and Futr, summed things up very quickly by facetiously asking, "What's Google+?"

"Google+ is dead," Willard told Benzinga. "It has been dead. It was dead on arrival. I'm glad to see Google is admitting failure and figuring out how to make their user experiences better. Google+ was not making anybody's experience better."

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.