Via The Verge:
Horowitz says that he’s now running Google’s Photos and Streams products — two new names for existing elements of Google+ that conspicuously don’t reference the social network. The name changes could possibly suggest that Google is planning to kill or significantly alter the brand, but the company has yet to make an announcement to confirm or deny this.
The photos part of Google+ has been fantastic for a number of years – and worth much, much, much more to me then the “social” side. At one point my entire photo library was in Google Photos, but having to use Google+ as part of that made it less than ideal.
Hopefully they’ll let you deactivate the “Streams” product if you don’t use it, so I can stop getting spam invites to events and groups.