In an unsurprising move Google has decide to pull plug on it’s social networking service, Google+. The service, started in June of 2011, was Google’s fourth foray into the social networking arena, and by most accounts can be considered a failure. Forbes magazine put it best when they stated that: “Google+ has been an unmitigated disaster: a textbook case study of mismanagement.”
I prefer a simpler analysis, the service was lame. Many problems plagued the network. Two immediately come to mind. The first of which is that the interface was not as intuitive as others. The second would be have to be the lack of popularity. Let’s face it how many people do you know that said “dude i’m so posting this to Google+. “, my guess is nobody. The problems with it’s core were apparent. But we can’t forget about the bug that Google blogged about, which could potentially expose personal details for 500,000 users. This security issue expedited the sun-setting of the consumer product.
Google has finally decided to put this service out of it’s misery, at least in part. They will sunset it for consumer use on April, 2, 2019. The business version will, however, remain available as part of the Google Suite. The scuttling of this product is bot surprising. The surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.
*Editors note: We have a Google+ page