Can You Fall in Love with a Social Network?
Pitched internally as an answer to the competitive threat posed by Facebook, project “Emerald Sea” eventually became Google+. I remember Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina writing back in 2011 something to the effect that ‘sharing on the web was broken,’ which was what first gave me the sense that this team wasn’t only interested in building a Facebook killer. They wanted to use Google’s strengths in processing information to reinvent what it meant to share information on the web.
I joined Google+ within a month or so of its launch in June 2011. I’d already been on Twitter for four years and Facebook for three and was excited about how this new service combined the long-form writing of blogs with new bells and whistles for social sharing.
Circles enabled me to organize and prioritize the people I followed. Ripples provided a very sophisticated tool for seeing how people’s posts rippled through the network. Sparks strived to organize the network by topics. Oh, and it was all held together with powerful search capabilities that were quite laughable in the other networks.
I fell in love.
An Interest-Sharing Community
I wasn’t alone. Within a year, I had developed a number of great relationships with people on Google+. These weren’t the school friends I followed on Facebook or work associates I was connected to on LinkedIn. These were people I didn’t already know who shared my interest in various topics.
By early 2012, I’d come to the conclusion that Google+ was something very different from Facebook’s social network. It represented an intersection between relationships with people and connections to ideas. It was, in short, a “shared interest network.” I even put together a slide show using Google+ images to explain this idea. It went viral and people on the Google+ team told me privately that I’d nailed the essence of their network:
Shared interest graph from Gideon Rosenblatt
Google ended up embracing this direction in both its positioning and product development. I’m not saying this was because of me; I had probably just picked up on the zeitgeist of the service a bit early.
The company had begun describing Google+ as a place for sharing passions. In late 2012, it launched Communities. Then in 2015, it launched Collections, which essentially mimicked categories on blogs.
It was a logical strategy. Facebook had already taken the market for staying in touch with family and high school friends and the world didn’t really need the inconvenience of having to publish things to close connections on two such networks.
Having missed that opportunity, the shared interest network was the only real market segment that was even viable for Google. The media didn’t understand this new market, but the company had a great product offering. Had they kept focused on it, I am convinced that there was a path to a real market opportunity here. Being at the intersection of people and interests extends Google’s dominance over the “interest graph” from Search and as they have demonstrated, there is plenty of willingness to advertise around what people find interesting. Had they combined that with relationships in more interesting ways, it could have been a very valuable service.
But somehow, something got in the way.
It Takes a Community
Before getting to what went wrong, it’s worth focusing on another, less obvious, factor behind the magic that was Google+ in its prime: its community.
Maybe it’s just what happens when you bring people into a big online social network and help them find others who share their interests. Or maybe it was the way Google+ echoed the original blogosphere by allowing people to share long posts and reply to those posts with equally long comments. To be honest, I’m not sure we’ll ever truly know why, but those first few years on Google+ were a time of tremendous community.
Whether it was by design or sheer dumb luck, Google had stumbled onto something quite amazing in those early years: a group of people who absolutely loved the place and the sense of community it engendered.
The Fall
So, what happened? There are lots of different theories, but in my
In April 2014, Vic Gundotra stepped down as head of Google+ in response to the company’s decision to deemphasize the service as a centralizing social layer for all its offerings. David Besbris stepped in for a while and was then replaced by Bradley Horowitz. Then things get murky. There was Luke Wroblewski, whose title was never really clear, but who was responsible for driving the mobile-first design and strategy linked to the disastrous redesign of the service in November 2015. Wroblewski left without any public mention and the company simply stopped talking
These changes in management resulted in numerous twists and
In September 2016, the Google+ team found a new home in G Suite in the hopes that the network might serve as a kind of Slack-like corporate intranet. Then, in early October of 2018, after an internal review of vulnerabilities in the Google+ API, the company made a surprise announcement in what seemed to be a routine blog post about corporate security: it would shut the service down for consumers in August of 2019. Then new vulnerabilities were discovered a month later and the shutdown date was pulled in four months earlier.
A Shameful Ending
Since that announcement in October, the company has demonstrated what can only be described as outright negligence over the closing of this service. The October 8 and December 10 announcements that this service is shutting down read almost like afterthoughts. Since then, there has been only one additional clarifying communication — in this case, information to third-party developers about shutting down the Google+ API.
The lack of communication with end users is shocking. It is now mid-January and we still don’t know exactly on what date the service will close. We don’t know whether our ability to download our data from Google+ will continue past April. The original announcement promised that:
Over the coming months, we will provide consumers with additional information, including ways they can download and migrate their data.
Project Strobe
But the Google Takeout tool for downloading that data is still quite broken. There is no clear data format specification and the data you get from downloads is very difficult to make sense of. It also includes a huge number of duplicate images, resulting in large and unwieldy files that a number of users report they are unable to reliably download.
Most frustrating is the fact that the data on the people you follow is incredibly sparse. It includes a first name and last name and a link to a Google+ user profile web address but there is no guarantee will continue to exist after April. So, basically, our connections with others are lost. I had over 50,000 people following me on Google+. That took a lot of work to build up that following for my writing, and now it is simply gone.
In mid-December, not long after the December 10th announcement, I worked with a handful of volunteers to gather questions from the community about the shutdown process, which we compiled into a document on Google Drive. I then worked some back channels to try to get these concerns into the right hands at Google. Weeks have gone by, the April shutdown looms closer and closer, people are looking for answers about what to do with all their investments in this network, and there is still not a word of clarification from Google.
The way the company has treated its users represents a complete failure of leadership on the part of Google.
The Lesson in All This
Shutting down any product or service that end users rely on is always difficult and companies need to take a decision like that very seriously. In this case, however, we are talking about a service that would simply not exist without all the contributions made by its end users. Since 2011, I have personally contributed 5,479 posts to Google.* Imagine multiplying that kind of investment across hundreds of thousands of other people and you see the enormity of this failure and the
In the short term, I’m moving most of my social network efforts to Twitter. Longer term, I don’t want to ever have to go through like this again — and I don’t want anyone else to either.
The main lesson of Google+ is that it’s time to stop trusting our creations and our relationships to companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the hopes that they will do the right thing with them. They will do the right thing as long as it maps to their primary purpose, which is maximizing returns for their shareholders. When that stops being true, well, then, that assumption of trust disappears. Google+ demonstrates this problem more vividly than any product or service shutdown that I can remember.
That is why I am closely tracking what Tim Berners-Lee is doing with Solid. It’s time to liberate our data and our social ties and social contributions are an important part of that effort.
* I know that I uploaded 5,479 posts to Google+ because I have now downloaded them all through a very useful tool from Friends+Me, called Google+ Exporter. I’ve since used that tool to integrate those posts into this blog.
Thanks for saying what most of G+ members are thinking! Many of us put in a lot of time and effort into building Google Plus into an amazing way to connect and learn with others from around the world. All of us feel that Google has let us down, and we’ve lost faith and trust in all Google products. It’s a very sad state, and folks are beyond upset about its closing and Google’s lack of communication with us. I’ve joined all the sites where my friends are migrating, and none of them compare to G+….Google let a great product slip through their fingers!
Thank you for dropping by, Katie. Yes, over this last couple of months I really had hoped that perhaps, just perhaps we might be able to figure out how to move people from G+ over to something like Solid where we’d be able to control our own data. But Solid is not yet ready for prime time and then when Google pulled the date in by four months, that pretty much sunk it.
And yes, they did let a great product slip right through their fingers. That’s just really bad management.
So happy this social media will be closed for Good. 90% fake profiles, nudity and porn. Close it now!
I agree with Katie but also with dylan. No more PORN!
Falling in love with a social network carries with it the danger of getting your heart broken when it walks out on you. That’s exactly how I’m feeling as I await the inevitable (if unknown to us) lights-out date. The photography community alone has enriched my life immeasurably, and some of us are scrambling to establish other social homes for our collaborative photo projects. So far, the best bets appear to be recreating the projects as purpose-built blogs and Websites. It won’t be the same, and we’ll lose the constant inflow of new participants, but at least we won’t lose each other.
Yes, I’m coming to the conclusion that it comes down to a publishing platform to hold your content (be that articles or photos or music or whatever) and then a discovery platform for reach people and drawing them to your creations.
We have good solutions for the publishing. They were basically what we had before the centralization that occured with the social web (i.e. blogs). I think Solid could bring us back to that as well. The thing we haven’t yet figured out is what to do about the discovery challenge.
No good news, unfortunately, but your analysis tastes very bitter though true +Gideon Rosenblatt . I can’t stop thinking about the lost chances in the ages of the weigh of SocialMedia rising. It’s barely to understand the reasons neither the backgrounds and circumstances which lead to the hard decision. We users feel betrayed for our energy angagement time and enthusiasm we put in here. Still, I feel the loss and like homeless future.
Hope to meet you and folks here on other platforms 🙂
Yes, there is some bitterness, Monika. Part of it is the frustration for all the personal time and energy poured into this platform and part of it is the sense of how that multiplies out across thousands of people who trusted in a platform like this. I wish there were an easy answer for where people can regather.
Yes, no answers still.
“Don’t build your home on rented properties” is my mantra.
I am building my own community on my own site around people that I like, and I’m helping my clients do the same.
Amen, Yifat. The key question is how we handle discovery for the things we’re creating on our own sites. What are you using to build community on your site, by the way?
It’s all WordPress so it’s discoverable.
BTW.. Your article popped up ony Google Now, proving my point (wink)
That’s surprising. You mean like in the news feed?
I’ve missed your posts on G+. Good luck with your website following!
Thank you, Korinne. And thanks for stopping by.
Gideon – well written summary with an insider’s perspective, and thank you for not using the word “Ghost Town” once.
What Google doesn’t realize is that they are permanently damaging their brand with their lack of commitment and lack of care for their customers. As a CEO , I’ve had several “New Google Offerings” contact me in the last 6 months to “help” me with new services they can provide me (Recruiting and Brand Positioning).
I have such a sour taste after Google Wave / Google + that I doubt I will ever trust that corporation with any mission critical business process.
Thanks for the kind words. And, yes, Jeffrey, they have wildly underestimated the fallout still to come over the loss of trust for something this big. Killing Google Wave or Google Reader is one thing, but users were able to recover relatively easy from those shutdowns. Destroying social graphs is another matter entirely.
Google created a money machine with AdWords. Everything else, it’s like King Midas in reverse, they damage literally everything they touch. They bought Orkut just to murder it.
Google hire bright people and for the most part, have them doing stupid things.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
I’ve backed away from anything Google and wish I could back away from Android development, that’s been an uncoordinated mess forever. I fully expect Google to screw up GMail and GSuite and no longer recommend either to my clients, though I wish I could.
Google have become a parody of themselves. I do not believe their excuses about the insecure G+ APIs.
You nailed it. I view Google like a free advertising weekly who received an inheritance from Dad and whose employees have too much time on their hands and little experience running a business.
Outside of advertising there’s Android (except they really don’t control it), Waymo (remains to be seen where that goes, if anywhere), Assistant (don’t see work on enterprise uses and consumer side doesn’t seem to have a goal in sight) and…..???
Why would anyone risk their business by using the playthings that will go away in a couple of years?
I find it highly ironic that instead of the wonderful geotagged posts in Google+, called Nearby, that were so successful in connecting local people on Google+, (a lost feature after an app redesign) we now have posts.google.com for big brands and posts.google.com/bulletin for local people. If that isn’t crazy thinking, I don’t know what is???:pensive:
Yeah, I find the whole “posts” thing very confusing, Mark.
You have made -Me! realize what it is that I am loosing once again. You nailed it with his article
Thank you…and, er, sorry?? 😉
First Inbox, and then Google+. With G+ shutting down and the management’s utter lack of communication and transparency, I’ve lost what little trust I had left in Google. It’s like they wanted to find any excuse to get rid of G+. Solid and Openbook sound pretty promising as G+ replacements, but only time will tell.
Agreed, Gabriel. Openbook, by the way, has said previously that they intend to build upon Solid.
Gideon, thank you for everything you did to make Google+ an interesting place to visit. Like some of the other commenters, my opinion of Alphabet/Google has been permanently damaged by how they have handled to the shutdown.
Thanks for the note and the kind words, Neil. They’re much appreciated.
I can think of at least 10 different people that I met on Google plus that I consider to be some of the best friends but I have. It has been an invaluable resource.
That’s cool to hear, Mark. I’ve made some good friends too. It’s weird though, some of them, and these are people who really know aspects of me, are people I’ve never met in person.
That’s a common theme that I’m not sure Google has addressed. The definition of marketing is to find a need and fill it. I believe the need was fulfilled
Same here, but thanks to Hangouts, and now Zoom, we “see” each other all the time.
Yess…I have invested alot of time in G+…Over 5 years 10000 followers, over 4000 posts….Made endless friends/circles/ communities/collections…Only social media platform for me…WHAT NEXT NOW…!??? DO NOT SHUT DOWN…Am sure many G+ followers do not want to hear SHUTDOWN…
Dedicated users knew what G+ was, but I think that was completely lost on Google execs. Which explains the series of bumfuzzled direction changes. I also think egos trumped honesty, Google refused to purge accounts that were dormant for years. I had Collections with as many as 80K followers; but engagement is 20% of January 2017, which is when I noticed the collapse starting. In any event, good synopsis, echos how many of us feel.
Well written and right on point. Thanks for putting together what many of us think.
I can’t see myself ever trusting any new or existing Google service ever again. In fact, given the choice, I would move away from Gmail and I sure as hell won’t be tricked into their latest attempt to socialize YouTube.
The problem is…there is no getting away from Google (same can be said about Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook and Apple to some extend). Google is everywhere. You will have a hard time living a Google free life. Sad but true.
Well put. I received one of the coveted beta-test invitations just ahead of the public launch and was immediately hooked. Google+ was an excellent product up until charismatic/visionary Vic Gundotra left the company. Instead of being proud of quickly becoming number two to dominant Facebook, they retreated to the crying rooms in shame as the tech press hyenas berated them with false reports of a ghost-town. They could have had what Instagram is today. Once it was turned over to the engineering geeks it was doomed. They ripped the photography element out, deleted good desktop features in the quest for re-coding the entire app to be “Mobile First” and created a secret, parallel, internal version for Googlers who then abandoned the public app. Now they will try to market the internal version as a social for business product competing with Slack, LinkedIn and Liveworld . . . this will fail as well. I hope there will be a good way for me to migrate my thousands of posts over the past seven years to some other service or at least download and archive all that data. RIP Google+ .
I didn’t know about the “secret, parallel, internal version for Googlers.” By that, are you referring to the domain-hosted, ‘intranet’ service that is to replace it? I didn’t realize they were already using that in-house.
None of us will ever go with Google products again, that’s for sure! Ditched most things Google 2 years ago. Their security breach is just fake news – they always knew and didn’t want it to come out for public airing!
Yes, we observed the craze for ‘mobile friendly’. They didn’t know what they had, or more likely – being psychopathically part of the corrupt deep state corptocracy cabal that is the Dem swamp centre of American politics – they had no interest in real peoples’ sharing of ‘interests’, as Gideon so well describes. I wonder how much posts of this nature also influenced decision.
In short they missed a boat, but others will salvage some of the diaspora of G+ goodwill created… Already many sites have a G+ refugees group, Flickr, Pluspora, etc. but surely nothing will match their built in search engine for Plussers. Twitter is utter crap at that.
Social scientists of the future will write of the lost chance of studying how people might create a real organised knowledge hub – or even world wide friends hub in long form writing – and maybe thats it – they didn’t want REAL people to mess up their AI inventions. its a pity G+ couldn’t have been taken over by Plusser insiders to run themselves, via hundreds of pods. Very surprising that is not happening.
I do love Google and were quite satisfied with their services
I have been to others , but nothing compares to Google
It is a big disapontment , Google is shutting down
Over the years , i have grown to love this network , i will surely miss it
I found a good alternative to be the following:
– If you just want a community / e-mail list – use Google Groups.
– And my favourite minds.com – An open source and decentralized social network for Internet freedom. Earn crypto for your contributions to the network.
https://www.minds.com/faq
Regards
Sooo sad t read about… I always loved using google+ from Lebanon
Gideon, thank you for writing this. I don’t suppose you could also write something about the way you integrated everything into this website, as a guide for the rest of us who would like to do something similar?
Hmmm…my main desktop machine is out of commission and that has my Photoshop, which I’d probably need to make useful images for something like that. Let me think about it. Worst case, I can pull together a quick G+ post.
Great post Gideon.
Thanks, John.
I find myself falling in love again, at the new venture over at http://youme.social
I am prepared to get my heart broken again, but will give it a go…
Thanks for a great post, Gideon. Appreciate how you delineated what was special about Google+ and what is now lost. For me it raises the question of whether I should be using Google Docs, gmail, or other Google products. Seems like “don’t be evil” has long since been abandoned, if it was ever their northstar. Do I want this company to store all the intimate details of my professional and personal life? And what options do I have? Hard not to get cynical.
Thanks, Fran. Yes, moves like this really do shake your confidence in a company when you see that it treats end user investments of time and energy with so little care.
This is the biggest piece missing in this demise – what about those paying for Google Suite, and those posting to Google My Business (blue awning) – such a disconnect of information relating to whether that will even matter or be available. Rented space, yes Yfat. I agree. But it’s difficult to get excited about the next product they offer since they have proven to be so fickle with features and platforms, as well as disrespectful to users who are fiercely passionate. I’m grateful for the most sincere, collaborative people I’ve met simply because of what G+ was. I’m grateful for the skills I honed, as well.
Yes, Susan, and what that G Suite offering will actually even be is a big mystery to me. Given the team’s performance over the last couple of years, I personally wouldn’t bet much on it.
Who knows though, maybe they’ve been hard at work on this and are about to unveil a masterpiece. But at this point, given the regard the company has shown for existing users, I can’t see anyone being willing to invest in its adoption.
You just hit the nail on the head with this. I’ve met so many wonderful people and made so many great connections that I’m truly sad that it’s all going to be gone soon . I’m even more sad at how Google is handling it. I mean, there were porn bots and the place was getting overrun by porn bots, but it was my little cesspool dammit! And I loved the place.
Yes Killie, a few years ago the porn bots started, and google was unable to ‘block’ when we asked. Thats quite a demise.
G+ was an amazing adventure. I joined in late stage beta and was active until last August. At one point, I had over 42000 followers. I’m still friends with some of the people I meet early on.
One way to know you’re making a positive impact is when outsiders begin attacking and attack they did. We were never meant to be another Facebook; indeed, many of us were on G+ precisely because it’s was the un-Facebook. Yet, the “media,” who never really understood G+, couldn’t help the comparison and panned us because our population of users was smaller. It was that smaller community, though, that made it so special and intimate.
The handwriting was on the wall with Gundotra’s departure, though. The defection of Google employees as active members of the posting community foreshadowed its demise. The integration of the YouTube community was another nail in the coffin, as was the forced membership of anyone with a gmail account. Those actions diluted the community and poisoned the well. The end had already come.
I left the platform in August 2018. I downloaded all of my data. I’m no longer a fan of Google and am really soured on social media as a whole now. I’m no longer acsocial media manager and content creator. I’m rethinking how we communicate and build relationships. I’m advocating for face-to-face interactions again.
People make the world what it is, not corporations. If we’ve learned anything of value in this Google experience it should be that we can’t let corporations dictate and control how we communicate and build relationships. We ultimately, and finally, know what is and isn’t relevant in our lives. No corporation can tell us that.
That’s well-said, Korinne. I must admit though that I tend to lean more toward a hybrid approach. There’s nothing like face-to-face connection. You really get much more of a sense for the essence of someone that way. And still, we are starting to move into a world where work itself is becoming increasingly abstracted and connected by digital technologies. We still need ways of finding each other and working with each other over the web. (see this latest post: https://www.the-vital-edge.com/working-with-others-in-shared-interest-networks/). That’s why I’m tracking developments on Solid and other decentralizing tech.
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Google lost – again – a lot of trust.
I remember the time, when blogs and rss feeds were the way to go. Then with rss readers one could follow interesting blogs and people. But rss never took off really and Google again killed GReader and then Google+
If there is a platform to be trusted by its users, it has to be done by some NGO or alternatively completely decentralized.
Still looking for a way to go, but with Google+ it was so easy – but easy and to be trusted seems to not go together.
Hope to read it again- just subscribed.
Siegfried
What is so frustrating about all this, Siegried, is that there doesn’t really seem to be an obvious choice of where to migrate. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Diaspora all have their limitations and I agree that some sort of trustworthy steward for community is badly needed. Is it in the NGO framework? I don’t know. I do like what Solid is up to, but it is more focused on storing and linking data. Much work would remain to transform that data into views that would constitute a social networking app.
Thanks for subscribing.
Excellent Read and factual ! Gideon you are one of a handful of people I would read with enthusiasm. Each post in the 9 months I participated where food for my eyes and brain. You took personal time to speak to neuroscientist, accurately reporting details many of us, unless we are at Stanford, would ever hear. You wrote about your son, your life, your interests of many – glorious. When the Collections came, I knew instinctively it was the end. I wrote and spoke openly, but others felt defensive and negated my words. My articles, some were blocked form the very sciences I speak and write on, it was dismal and we no longer could find some of our friends in other venues. Now admittedly I’m still part of LinkedIn that seems to have more value, but social media is too time consuming and in the long run, as you have experienced here, your 5400+ articles, all the friends, was the brief years worth an exit experience such as this.
I pulled myself off of social media except to stream my articles which many find inspiring, however, as I hear in your words here, the LOSS and Heart rendering echo of time – was it a waste? NO, you are not a waste nor your words and I for one and more than honored to have met and read your brilliance. More frustrating is google has now shut down it’s URL shortener. What most of us desire is less personal life invasion, than taking away good services it once lent to the world.
Bad decisions does not leave a favorable taste in one’s mouth – the sting will last a long time and trust may never be offer again. Thank you Gideon for once again an excellent article of facts and truth!!
Thanks for the comment, Michele. You are right: it was not a waste of time. I’ve made lots of great connections on Google+. It helped me to articulate my thoughts in writing with much greater speed than I normally do as well, and that’s something I’d not thought about before and something that is now proving useful as I devote more energy to my own site. So much good will generated in that place too.
Great point Gideon. We’ve all learned to write and think almost simultaneously. I notice this when I blast off a comment on Twitter without hesitation, or when I’m describing something of my own work interest somewhere. My ‘editor’ ear kicks in quickly. It may be some years before we actually can calculate the value to all our destinies.
Thanks for posting this Gideon.
Most of what you wrote expresses how I feel about the close down, only rather more eloquently written. I’ve been in business for over 40 years (and nearing retirement ), and founded an online software development company in the late 90s that I’ve exited relatively recently. From a business perspective, companies clearly have the right to change their product lines, or remove non performing products and or services from their business model.
However, with social networks, the compact with the user is fundamentally different to simply the provision of widgets. The social environment clearly creates an attachment amongst users that is both intellectual and emotional. Users invest vast quantities of time in the social relationships and in my view that investment requires a commensurate degree of responsibility from the provider of the network. That doesn’t happen of course, look at Mr Zuckerberg who regards his users with disdain, or Google that has communicated less with its users about the G+ shutdown than I could have imagined. I suspect in fact that the Google senior management team that authorised this shutdown have absolutely no understanding of the relationships and communities that exist here. (or if they do, their callous handling of the closure deserves the greatest scorn.)
So, as the people here scatter to all parts of the web, I find myself considering leaving social media altogether, and yet: the friendships I’ve made are real, the knowledge I’ve accumulated is significant, the things I’ve learnt beyond what I thought possible, how can we give that up? Sadly I don’t have any answers right now.
(On a side not, I read your comments about your number of posts etc with some interest. I’d never seen any data on what I’d posted but apparently I’ve written 3 average length novels (not including comments), posted over 5,000 photographs and can’t even begin the estimate the time I’ve invested here. Perhaps we should charge Google for the use of our content :)) )
Thanks again for both this article and your always interesting and sometimes enlightening writing over the years, it’s been greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Chris
What an excellent perspective to add to this whole thing, Chris. That’s really well-said. Yes, of course, companies have the right to change strategies and product lines, and, as you point out the particular nature of this service is such that there seems to be a higher bar that’s required. I’ve got a piece already written and scheduled to go out this Friday on just this topic. It’s about the fact that while we don’t pay for these services, we do invest in them and that perhaps the tide will turn so that companies that rely on these kinds of contributions will be forced to better value them. A quick preview from that piece:
“I just did a quick calculation, assuming I averaged about twenty minutes for each of my Google+ posts. At Seattle’s $15 minimum wage, that translates into $27,000 — add in time commenting and that probably doubles.”
I actually like your relating it to publishing novels better though. Thanks for dropping by.
I don’t really have a view on Google’s decision to run down and then kill Google+, but I really did love it when it existed properly. Many of the people I met there I am still in touch with, admire and am glad I was ever able to meet (yourself included Gideon). G+ enabled those connections, and for that I’m really grateful. It may well be one of those seeding moments that is most visible in hindsight.
Yes, Adam, the people were what made it sing. You are a perfect case in point. We’re still connected on Facebook, but we never really run into one another any more — and I miss that. Our back and forth on the Good Business Community gave me a chance to learn about what you’re up to and a bit about your life. These are the kinds of loose ties that fall away when systems like this die. I hope that life is treating you well. Thanks for dropping by. It’s good to hear from you.
Thanks for that Gideon, you speak for us all
I’m sure Google Plus is no longer effective as it should be, but then, it still a good community for people to meet. Unlike Facebook, i do think Google Plus is where matured minds come to interact with each other.
Thanks to that i am able to read a wonderful article about the fall of Google Plus.
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