Shutting Down Google+ for Consumers

Disagree strongly. Lots of categories are a fundamental part of the human experience. No one company can or should try and compete in all of them.

I really admire Apple here a lot more than Google. They seem to have a stronger sense of who they are and who they are not.

just out of curiosity, when was the last time google shut down a product that you were actively using?

For me it was Reader, and that was the only time. and yeah, i'm still a little salty about it. But every company shuts things down - google can't keep all their dead and unused failures running forever, and Google+ was obviously deserving of a shutdown.

"i don't trust google because they shut down things nobody uses" isn't really a rational complaint.

I unfollow (in contrast to unfriending) people who post things that I'm not interested in. I "hard follow" friends that post really cool stuff. By "hard following" I mean "See First" functionality of the the Newsfeed algorithm. It helps to keep my newsfeed more or less under control. I also try to teach the newsfeed to only show relevant ads by hiding those that I don't care about and clicking the ones I find interesting.

I've been a long-time critic of G+.

But it's because I've also been a long-time user of the service, signing on in July of 2011, and continuing to use it, often through gritted teeth, and desperately hoping something better would come along, and yet ... nothing really has, at least not that I've been aware.

There's a long litany of mistakes and errors (and many successes) in the service, and I might eventually sit down and write my own post mortem of what I thought went right and wrong -- I've written a few, most of which still stand, though the cooption of media, social and otherwise, for propaganda and disinformation purposes could be expanded on.

There are several groups formed to look at exodus options, presuming people want to go to any one platform (something I'd actually somewhat discourage). It may be that the age of centralised social networks is over, though self-hosting and federation also have considerable challenges. Or, maybe, we go back to other models. Hacker News is an exemplar I've referenced more than a few times. It's not a personal network the way G+, FB, Twitter, or a personal blog are, but it has a (usually) high level of discussion of an interesting array of topics. Thanks in large part to active moderation and flying slightly under the radar.

If you're on G+ and want to discuss next steps, stop by Google+ Mass Migration:

https://plus.google.com/communities/112164273001338979772/

This was the biggest appeal of Google+ for me: That they recognised two things about relationships that Facebook pretends doesn't exist. Namely that relationships are inherently asymmetrical, and that we are different people to different people.

We learn both of these from early childhood. We all at some point go through the realisation that our best friend may not always see us as their best friend and vice versa. Not forcing a two-way connection or nothing is an essential part of how humans actually relate.

Secondly, allowing easier more precise control of who we share what with. I don't want to share pictures of my son with everyone I have some sort of relationship with. I want to share them with at most family and maybe a few others. I don't want to share pictures of a night out with work colleagues. And so on. Facebook basically forces you to reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator of what you're prepared to share with everyone unless you're very careful with permissions or make socially awkward distinctions about who you accept as friends.

And then, when you've reduced yourself to that, it forces your "friends" to wade through a bunch of stuff that you may well know a lot of them will have no interest in, as you point out.

Facebook is basically trying to force human relationships to change shape to suit their ad targeting, and eventually someone will figure out how to leverage that weakness into dethroning them.