Dead Google service walking

Google+ has been sunsetted and will be shut down in about 9 months. The idea of sunsetting is to allow users to abandon a service so they can’t complain about not being told the end is near. Most users abandon immediately leaving a few die hards to soldier on. I liked Google+ and thought the early version had great educational promise. It allowed a user to create circles which were an effective way to communicate that we have partially overlapping personal relationships in our lives and we communicate in different ways and about different things with those in different circles. The opportunity to protect student users was obvious. It offered Hangouts and later Hangouts on air which was an early group video meeting site I found very useful for my grad online classes. The Hangouts On Air allowed me to save class meetings to YouTube which was important for those who were unable to attend class. It, surprisingly, did not include ads. I know – weird for Google, but also a plus for educators. Some argue that the entire thing began to fall apart in 2014 when Vic Gundotra left Google. Gundotra championed Google+ in a vain attempt to move Google into social. I agree with the author of the post I link here claiming that Google+ was superior to Facebook, but it never attracted enough users to reach critical mass and failed to continue development allowing Facebook to mimic many of the advantages originally developed by Google. I think the online world is better off when there are options and competition. Perhaps with all of the problems no associated with Facebook, Google pulled the plug a little too early.