It’s like the farewell tour that never seems to end… Google announced the shuttering of its much maligned social network today. Well, not really. It had announced the shutdown a while ago after a data breach related to a software bug. But it is now accelerating the wind down, which is scheduled for April 2019.
But I have to ask, wasn’t this social network dead years ago? Who was meaningfully using this network other than Google employees who were likely required to do so? Us marketers, SEO types and the like were simply populating it with endless posts akin to the proverb of “if a tree falls in the woods and there’s nobody around, does it make a sound?”
No one ever purposefully went to Google+. This network was nearly DOA.
Google chased its peers when it came to social networking, never really finding its niché, convinced it could build versus buy. How many of us have made that mistake before?
Google threw in the towel long ago on this… I believe Google (well, Alphabet, I suppose), does best when it innovates in a space where there are few peers. Google also does well when it acquires and improves (Android). But it chased social and ultimately failed.
