The Core

It's heavily integrated with Youtube and probably other services... maybe there's an admittal it'll never be facebook but can't see them giving it the chop.

It was never meant to be Facebook.

g+ is primarily a way of identifying the people who use google services.  They just knew it was going to be creepy to modelled parts of it on the creepiest socially acceptable platform around: Facebook.  Google need to be able to identify us for a whole raft of reasons from knowing who's social signals to trust to being able to target individuals with advertising in a cookieless world.   In that respect it's been a great success.

I'm not really convinced that the social side has been the failure that so many people want it to be either.  About a year and a half ago I stopped using twitter regularly to try and "get into" g+.  I stayed with Facebook too - mostly to annoy people with kid pictures and so that I get angry about things.

G+ is busy. I've been editing my stream down a lot lately to make it more manageable.  I've got work through it too, which justifies the dicking about.  It's not got that back/forth banter of twitter (I miss that still) and parts of the search industry seem determined to stay away (guess which parts!!), but it isn't the ghost town that people claim it is. My g+ stream is certainly a lot busier than my facebook is now.  A lot.

It's different though.  The longer post format lends itself to less chatter than twitter.  Much of the life happens in communities.  I think that one of the big reasons people think it is so quiet though is that it doesn't try to get you to import all your contacts instantly (I think it might for gmail now), so you don't get that immediate hit of "friends" when you sign up.  

I wouldn't write it off just yet.  

FUD, completely groundless and these so called journalists are benefitting from classic link bait and everyone fell for it.

What about when Matt Cutts calls time on his career with Google? Will everyone say they are going to close down search?

Vic Gundotra was the "face" of Google+ and the guy who created I/O. The guy replacing him was one of the founding team and he looks like he has the skills to take things forward.

It was never, and will never be a Facebook or Twitter lookalike/wannabe.

The likelihood it has hit the tipping point and a lot of the people who got it to where it is can now be redeployed into other areas of the business that needs it. The community managers are not needed as it's a self-policing environment.

There are plenty enough evangelists not on the payroll for Google not to need to fund things.

I'm actually loving where they have got it, without bowing to pressure for things like a write API. That was a big negative when people could regurgitate the same crap on the fly via third party tools.

They have not got ads on the platform, and likely never will, they don't need to. Post Ads have just been made available to everyone with over 1000 followers and that takes Google+ outside of the platform and in to the GDN which I think is smart, as long as the advertisers realise it is not a direct response mechanism. Seeing examples from Toyota etc. won't help most people build their brand awareness and engagement.

Techcrunch should be ashamed they got reporters who know nothing about how the ecosystem at Google+ works to wax lyrical about why it was going to close because one guy decides to leave because of a life-event that made him take stock and he is likely to appear heading up somewhere like eBay or AOL or somewhere that needs him (Yahoo as Marissa Meyer no. 2?)

Once we know what he is going to do, we can see what the backdrop behind his decision was.