The grand unbundling of Google’s G+ social network continues, with Gmail becoming the latest Google service to gain its independence from Google’s campaign of forced integration. As noted in a post on the WordStream Blog, Google has axed the requirement that new Gmail accounts be tied to a G+ social networking account as of "early September." Mandatory G+ integration has been an unwanted millstone around many of Google’s popular services since 2012, when Google began to link G+ account creation to the sign-up process for most of its services (journalists even had to create G+ profiles in order for their names and pictures to appear next to their own stories in Google News search results).