The announcement of Google Plus’s shutdown, coming within a year of Orkut’s end, is a setback to Google’s intention to play the catch up game with the social networking giant Facebook. Though the anticlimax to two of their ideas is for different reasons altogether, it increasingly is a reflection of them not coming up with an alternative space for interaction. However, there were some good set of positives to take home. Even as the interface, say, with the +1’s being a replica of the likes or the sharing patterns was a sophisticated version of the popular examples, the privacy was an aspect it scored well. Meanwhile, the categorisation of people into different lists with the ‘circles’ too was of its neater sides.
The unparalleled strength of it being the photo-sharing features, the catchy integrations were the improvisation with the GIFs and the automatic uploads. The launch of Google Plus in comparison to that of their previous failures, Google Wave and Buzz, was rather measured. The user shift from other platforms too seemed to happen on an initial note, but the account integration with the emails, Google Drive and docs gradually turned out to be a mess altogether.
For every Hangout that existed in Google Plus with all the issues surrounding the plug-ins, FB played it well with the Skype tie up for its video-calling feature. The profiling of a user or an organisation integrating with the search engine commenced as an interesting move with a spring in the numbers. That didn’t last either. The collections feature, a while later, collaborating many user generated topics under one roof too remained only an act to facilitate its revival. The template with time though turned out to be a survival stint and missed the necessary element of quirk to catch fire.