Nothing to see here. Google is constantly running A/B experiments. 99.99% get the real version. 0.01% get a test version. It's not even a beta test of a future version. It's just a data collection thing. "If we arrange things like so, do people have an easier time finding what they want?" Wheaton apparently got one of these 0.01% experiments, and instead of asking if anyone else noticed the same thing, he instead decided to make a very public posting about how Google had wronged him. Also, G+ is not what people think it is. G+ is an effort to unify all the Google services so that they can interoperate with each other. There also happens to be a central sharing site that people refer to as G+, since it is a hub to viewing all the sharing activity, but G+ is a much larger effort than social. If you want Google to treat all of your services as separate accounts, then just create a separate Google account for each one. It's really that simple.