One login across all services was a bit of a ruse anyway --

Want to see Gmail? You've got to login ... Want to go see Adsense? You've got to login again ... Already logged in to G+? .. you still have to provide a password for Adsense .. It's a flipping merry-go-round.

Google is about as confused and disorganized as most others on the net it appears.

It would be nice to not have G+ .. and it would be even better if Youtube were completely dis-attached to anything Google.
Getting rid of G+ might not be a bad thing -- Tie Adsense/Words/WMT to the Gmail acct directly would be great -- and letting Youtube remain as a stand alone would be the best.

Youtube was fine 'till the big G got a hold of it - Should be able to use it without having to be logged in through your Gmail.

It will be good not to have to have a searchable profile for all the Google services you use. It ties too much together. I have one account for my G+ and I stick other Google services onto separate accounts. That's apparently the way that others would prefer to use their Google accounts as well.

I don't think this spells the end of G+ as an SNS. It may attract more users who wanted an SNS, but didn't want to throw all of their Google eggs in one basket...

So Google continues to fail at social, yea!
Wasn't Google+ the one where you have to use your real name, an alias wasn't allowed? As if there aren't any legitimate uses of an alias, or people "behave better" if it's their real name involved (as if half of Google+ accounts probably weren't fake "real names").
Like I said, always a pleasure to see pious Google fail again at social.

I'm surprised how many people still use G+, and I wonder how many would be there if they didn't have to have a profile there with their accounts. It was, in one way, a smart move by google to make it a requirement, but it only created animosity, and confusion.
I used to have a YouTube account, but the login got lost when it changed away from the original Youtube logins. It subsequently got lost again with the G+ requirement. It was, indeed a mess, and not handled particularly well, imho.

I suspect that G+ has a while to go before anyone can claim it's dead, but it's certainly not going to be what it was originally intended.

They ended the real-names requirement a while back. That didn't help them, but Facebook has the same policy. I have affected friends and they can't use their real names for various reasons.

Google thought that if they can force G+ in everyone's throats, the people who convert and start using G+ would be big enough to compete with the likes of Facebook. It backfired and now they finally waved the white flag, seeing how most people use G+ to up their landing pages SEO. I have a Photography community with almost 1300 followers and it is a healthy one (to my surprise) however I see more and more people running to my Pinterest. Case and point - their social model just does not fit the Internet.

Facebook's having trouble with enforcing real names Germany: Facebook Can Not Block User False Names [webmasterworld.com], too. Well, in Germany, at least.

Some have written eye-catching headlines about the death of G+ every time there's a change. Well, that's just eye-catching headlines, imho. G+ has never achieved what Facebook has, so it should never really have been compared, however, it's still got a great number of people that use it, and it's quite likely it'll continue as G+ is know for some time to come. It may have the plug pulled on Orkut September 30, 2014 [webmasterworld.com] after ten years, so if that's anything to go by, i'm sure it's hoping G+ will remain, and might yet stay for ten years.

Google uses G+ extensively, instead of putting information on its blogs. It also uses twitter quite a lot, but next to nothing on Facebook.

It's a good thing we don't have to use G+ for all Google tools!

There's a nice summary of G+ on Mashable which looks at the history of Google in the social space.

Google's effort to build a social network to rival Facebook began with a bold, company-wide yell. Now Google appears to be winding down Google+ with barely a whimper. Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook [mashable.com]

I still believe that Google were looking at the whole social space from the wrong angle - they are engineers - and they've made a great resource for engineers. Joe public doesn't really "get it". As soon as google added the demands of G+ accounts for everything it suffered a backlash by those using it, alienating many people.