Is the End Near For Google+

“folks who do social media well on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or SoundCloud – have really struggled to figure out what (if anything) Google+ does better than other services.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only people who actually USE G+ are ‘professionals’ that use social media platforms for personal branding or advertising themselves to others, a bit like a shopping mall where the only people who visit are the ones running shops.

As a platform it was too unintuitive for the un-technical, too corporate for the libertards, too clean for the Tumblr porn brigade and generally not exciting except as a place with tools for self-publicising. The way comments to posts on linked blogs also appeared on G+ was downright uncomfortable: that certainly discouraged me from commenting on a couple of blogs, and I may not be alone. And then there are the issues regarding privacy and the user being the product with Google (just as they are with Facebook, but once bitten etc). Cross-posting from blogs to G+ for me personally wasn’t useful; I’d read the blogs anyway by visiting directly (feeds make me feel too disconnected from the person actually writing – it’s the person that’s important, rather than just the words). I never linked my blog.

So I’d keep coming back to G+, take a brief look, end up shaking my head and moving on after a minute: there’s nothing for me there. Can’t say I’m surprised they want to wrap it up.

My own experience with social media has been to focus on the small, slightly rebellious and fun side of things. I spent about a year with Diaspora, starting just before G+ borrowed the Diaspora design. Initially it was very interesting, with a small and rapidly growing community that was fairly close-knit, but as it grew along came the agressive and the pornographers: they were much more influential in the way the community was shaped that the guys coding, who had been through several major crises of their own. I since moved to Libertree with some of the other ex-Diaspora people, and have been part of that community ever since – it’s still in Alpha, and unlikely to make it to finished code base because it isn’t a product.

So it will be interesting to see what happens with Ello.

My suspicion is that it will follow the path of Diaspora initially, but being VC funded, will HAVE to keep a lid on disruptive elements in the community until they can find a way to either exit or fund by some means to give the VCs their profit.

While writing this, I am reminded of Harmony Central. They were purchased by Guitar Centre who recognised the incredible potential of a music forum that behaved like a social network, and with hundreds of thousands of users all contributing original material and supporting each other. Unfortunately they also discovered that much of what went on wasn’t corporate-friendly, and a combination of several ill-considered forum software ‘upgrades’ and a PG13 censorship of conversations has pretty much killed the forum side of HC now.

I would guess that Ello will never become another Facebook, because social networks are now available in many places, but the only way to connect with almost the entire world is through that one network, and it seems there is nothing that FB can do that will actually annoy it’s users enough to make them migrate somewhere else. There will always be room for another small, intimate network, but that’s probably not going to provide a profit. I have, however, requested an invite.