returned relevant people and posts, as well as popular content from around the web. Messenger, also called Huddle, was a feature available to Android, iPhone, and SMS devices for communicating through instant messaging within Circles. Additionally, users could share photos in Messenger between their Circles. This feature was removed in August 2013 as it was superseded by Hangouts. Sparks was a front-end to Google Search, enabling users to identify topics they might be interested in sharing with others. "Featured interests" sparks were also available, based on topics others globally were finding interesting. Sparks was accessed as a pull-down from search results and helped to keep users informed of the latest updates on the topics of their interest. Sparks was removed sometime in November 2012. Games had 16 games when Google+ launched on August 11, 2011, which expanded to 44 a few months later, but by April 2013 there were 38 since some games were removed by the owner. Unlike Facebook games, Google+ games were located under a games tab, which gave games less visibility, and had separate notifications from the rest of a user's notifications. All games were removed from Google+ in June 2013. Ripples, introduced on October 27, 2011, was a visualization tool, showing how re-sharing activity happened regarding a public post. One could replay the public share's activity, zoom in on certain events, identify top contributors, view statistics about average chain length, the most influential people in the chain, the language of the sharers, etc. The feature was removed in May 2015. Hangouts, the feature that enabled users to chat, voice, and video conference between users, was removed from Google+ as part of the November 2015 redesign and made accessible through its own Hangouts homepage and mobile applications. Hangouts on Air, introduced in September 2011, the live streaming service was moved to YouTube Live starting September 12, 2016. What's Hot, introduced on October 27, 2011, was a stream showing what Google+ users had commented, shared and interacted with the most. It was similar to "Trending Topics" On Twitter. The page was removed in late 2015, but a new "discover" stream introduced in 2017 provided similar functionality. Photos was a suite of features which provided photo backup and editing, removed in 2015 and replaced with a separate product called Google Photos. Mentions was a separate stream that showed posts and images the user was +mentioned in. This page was