Thanks to the supreme product-pushing efforts of many of America’s brightest marketing agencies, our society has had the displeasure of passing through a wide variety of dumb fads: AOL Instant Messenger, Heelys, frosted tips, the Atkins Diet and Sisqó’s “The Thong Song”—still working on that one, admittedly.
Though we’d like to think that we’ve learned a thing or two from our apparent lack of foresight, we always seem to fall back into the pit of being “totally uncool.” Google+ is evidence of such a cyclical occurrence. She’s dead. She’s gone. Mercy, she’s both dead and gone.
Currently, for many users and marketing agencies, the social network is little more than a less-popular Facebook imitation, like something you’d download at a cheap hotel in Thailand. In fact, recently, Chris Messina—a designer who spent three years helping develop Google+ and is often credited with having invented the hashtag—said the following in a blog post through Medium: “Lately, I just feel like Google+ is confused and adrift at sea. It’s so far behind, how can it possibly catch up.”
Simply put, Messina saw the proverbial writing on the wall. Within three months of his initial harsh comments, Google announced that mandatory Google+ registration and Google Authorship were to become nothing more than a distant memory.
Furthermore, as if the damning happenings weren’t enough to put a slug in the figurative cranium of the Google+ thoroughbred, Google’s now put its Streams and Photos into standalone products for the handful of users who still employ them.
Truthfully, if even Google is unable to uproot Facebook as the world’s most beloved time-waster and social platform for marketing agencies, no entity short of Al Gore and his team—he did invent the Internet, after all—likely will.
