Google+ sealed fate I haven’t seen as such
It’s almost a year after Google+ has been officially discontinued for consumer (personal) accounts. I have something to admit about that has its ties to a 5 years old blog post.
I made a reply to a post by Gary Vaynerchuk. Briefly, Gary is an entrepreneur, internet personality and influencer. He describes himself as a “Jets Owner-in-Waiting”. He is New York Times best selling author and much more.
Five years ago, on January 23rd, 2015 Gary published a post on Medium.com titled “Google+ Is Not Dead”. The subtitle of the same post was “But it does have an expiration date”, which gives you an idea about what I disagreed with. I did and I was wrong, on the other side, not surprisingly, Gary was right.
In reply to Gary’s post shared on Google+ I wrote “Sorry, I don’t see it like that… #Google+isnotafailure see ya in 2020 about this… ;)”
Furthermore, I’ve set a reminder in my calendar on January 23rd, 2020 to go back to his post and ask him what he has to say about it 5 years later. Obviously, as he was right this Social Media does not exist anymore. However, all this brought me to write this blog post.
When you have the audacity to publicly disagree with someone on a subject for which he is an expert, you should have the fairness to admit publicly you were wrong.
My favorite Gary’s thought about Google+ at that time
When I go back and read Gary’s post today it’s astonishing how much right he was.
They are an amazing company, and my current pick for the best tech company in the world. But Google+ is something that is, simply, outside of their DNA. They tried to copy what they observed, and it was ill-fated.
The blog post can still be read on Media.com.
Reactions by others to Gary’s prediction
Not all were specific about whether they supported Gary’s opinion. There were certainly some who disagreed with him.
Chris Southern
I’m on Google+ all day. Enough said!
Darek Abello
Google+ is a much better platform for my Business than Facebook.
Kenneth Bishop
I respectfully disagree. I would have preferred to see some metrics that support your hypothesis. It seems that you’ve provided what amounts to nothing more than your gut feeling.
Mike McKenzie
That’s always the question because people like me will adopt most anything that Google recommends or creates.
Why I thought Google+ will not die
On the other hand I personally never compared Google+ to Facebook or any other social media. It was a high-quality platform, one of its own kind. I did like it.
If you ask me, Google+ always had a better way of displaying content with regard to Facebook.
Approximately 395 million monthly active users and over 2 billion registered users make you believe it has its own purpose. From my point of view, presented numbers should have been worthy to keep the whole thing running.
Was it really taken down for the reason published?
There are a couple of things that make me think to shut down Google+ was at least a very bad move if not a great mistake.
At Google, they were not fascinated by numbers. They substantiate their reasons with some facts.
In a blog post by Ben Smith, Google Fellow and Vice President of Engineering wrote:
“The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”
Hold on a second, why this could not have been a 395 million-five seconds user community?
And…
“Our review showed that our Google+ APIs, and the associated controls for consumers, are challenging to develop and maintain. Underlining this, as part of our Project Strobe audit, we discovered a bug in one of the Google+ People APIs:”
Hold on for another second, please. Should we understand this as, first they didn’t do it right, then they weren’t able to clean the mess and do whatever is needed to make things less challenging and easier!?
Whatever, these were rhetorical questions. Google got tired of not being a competitor to Facebook. One day they decided to quit the race. After all, they’re very used to be the leader in whatever they do.
