It seems Google+ may be getting new attention, even if it seems it was deemed a failure by many.

Q: The one thing that comes to mind is Google+. We haven’t seen a lot of new things there and many people outside of Google think it’s been a flop. What are the lessons you learned from it? What’s the future for it?

A: Google+ has always meant two things for us. There’s the stream in the product that you see. And for us, Google+ was also a way by which Google after many years, we made sure there’s common [login and] identity across our products. The second part was in many ways even more important than the first part. That part has worked really well for us. In terms of the stream itself, based on the stats we see, we have a passionate community of users. We would definitely like to see more scale at what we do. The team is working on a few next generation ideas. But to us these are two different things, and I don’t think we have always done a good job of explaining that.

Forbes Interview With Google's Sundar Pichai on Google Plus [forbes.com]

Q: Should we expect Google+ to remain as one big product?

A: I think increasingly you’ll see us focus on communications [Hangouts], photos and the Google+ stream as three important areas, rather than being thought of as one area.