Google+ Day

Happy 5th Birthday to Google+, the clear winner in the social media battle that made Facebook shut down its servers in a clear surrender almost immediately.

Jokes aside, I actually liked the concept of Google+ when it came out, and gave it a fair shot at grabbing my attention. However, once I got done making jokes about +1s and Circles, the bottom line was that there just wasn't enough of a network present to justify its continued use. The whole point of social media is to brag about how great your life is to all of the plebians who probably shop at Food Lion, and if no one is home, your message gets lost in the ether. After a half year or so, I returned to Facebook which boasted a larger network effect, even though they still fail to comprehend that I always want to see every news post from every friend in most recent order until I say otherwise.

Google's subsequent attempts to force-cultivate a network by integrating Google+ with every other service was really the final straw for me -- it felt like a rich kid's parents threw a birthday party at the petting zoo in hopes that everyone would show up and befriend their friendless offspring. Funnily enough, we still use Google+ at work, but it never caught on there either, even with a captive audience. I'm sure the phrase, "We had to block Google+ on the network because people were wasting too much personal time there", has never been uttered by a corporate IT administrator.