Stop Press 15 October 2018: Following the disclosure of data breaches and disappointing public support for the platform, Google has announced that it will close down Google+ for consumers in/around April 2019. Google will, however, continue to offer private Google+ powered networks for those businesses that currently use the platform. To quote Ben Smith, Google Fellow and VP of Engineering at Google: “It has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps.” Click here to read the full official Google post in which he has written – entitled “Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+”
Our view – For some reason, from the very beginning of its existence in 2011, there was a lot of confusion for many businesses regarding Google+. Perhaps they felt that there were already arguably too many social networks to have to deal with. So what could the value be of Google+ ? What would make it worth adding onto the list? We originally found good reasons to answer these questions and for a while the social networking platform seemed to be gaining ground. 
According to one global index, there was at one point 25% of the world’s Internet users actively using Google+. So it meant that your customers and also your competitors might be using it when you were not.
Alas, the sun is about to set on this platform. In some ways it is a pity – one of the upsides of Google+ that we liked was the variety of “Communities” which people had started to build, showing the amazing diversity of interests that people have. Amongst these:
Just goes to show that not even Google gets it right all the time.