Some of you have probably heard that Google Plus is shutting down. Personally, I'm not overly convinced of the reasons why. For example, lots of company's experience data leaks and yet you don't see them falling on their sword? Also, a company like Google should be able to resolve this (As they did) pretty quickly. I'm also not convinced by this accusation that "Hardly anybody uses it!" that accusation is rubbish, no honestly it is. Ask yourself, why would Google only kill it for Joe Public and yet not only maintain it for businesses but also roll out updates and enhancements? No, there's something else going on here and in my view, it's endemic of Google. Over the years there have been lots of services that they offer [for free] falling by the wayside after a year or two. With that in mind, the latest twist has hit the social media networks. Morgan Knutson, a former developer on Google Plus, has started spilling his guts on Twitter. I would say, when reading his post(s), keep in mind that stuff written by a disgruntled ex-worker is never going to be a glowing endorsement of your organisation.
Be warned, his discourse is very long, almost warranting a tl;dr and is littered with lots of To be continued.... The gist of what he is saying is actually more to do with himself rather than any technical issues or difficulties with Google Plus. Most of it seems to be taken up with observations on people he doesn't like or people he feels do not like him with the odd smattering of deriding peoples work as either “Inconsequential” or "Tacky".
Now some of you may be shocked at these so-called "Revelations" but having worked in business since I was eleven or twelve years old, my father used to take me to work with him helping out with stuff like answering the phone, sending faxes and making people drinks. I can safely say with first-hand experience that I've worked in very similar environments over the years, to be honest, that's how it is for a lot of company's so I actually found it rather refreshing that this false image of Google being a Nirvana of tranquillity and love just wasn't true or at least certainly not true in a fair few departments. But let's get back to Google plus. I always thought it was a good service although I never did get the hang of Pages and Communities mainly because they didn't offer any crossover to the main G+ profile. I like the fact that it wasn't Facebook which is a service that actually annoys me sometimes although that's a bit unfair as it's not Facebook so much as the types of individuals FB attracts. The other advantage was that it offered the ability to post more than 140 characters which was the limit on Twitter when I first joined G+
I've probably said this before, but I and a lot of my FOSS Community" friends came from the now defunct identi.ca literally as identica was going down in flames G+ sprang up. While it wasn't Open Source at the time not many people (Within my group of friends) wanted to use Twitter or Facebook and so G+ seemed an acceptable alternative given that at the time Google did have the business strapline of "Be Nice!" which, I might add, they dropped a while back. I'm going to miss G+ I often wish Steemit was a bit more like G+ especially when it comes to making a comment on a post you resteem, I want to know why someone resteemed something or at the very least I want to tell you why I did otherwise it just looks like I trawled through the posts resteeming at random for no good reason or even endorsement on the post content.
Over the years I've had lots of people trying to tell me G+ was dead, nobody uses it. I suspect they're all currently sitting in front of their monitors with a smug face saying "Told you so!"