I guess this is a good time if anyone wants to create something similar:
- contextual ads OK with me, particularly if they are inline and not third party
- or a small yearly fee for no ads
- same features as Google+
- create the API that Google+ always lacked
- I and a lot of others don't really care about E2E for that kind of conversations so just don't data mine us, don't follow us around the web and don't sell out to Facebook and we should be fine.
But I'm gonna miss it. I haven't been too active the last few months so I guess I might be to blame too (but then again I've not been active anywhere else either lately except here).
Where else do you go to meet people who share interests in a more general sense? HN doesn't care about photography. Twitter doesn't allow me to chose to see someones photos but not their crazy posts about politics. Facebook... well, don't even mention it. It's less than a week since last time they let hackers access theirs users accounts, and even if they had a perfect security record wrt hacking, it seems they just can't stand the temptation to abuse data: change settings, do experiments on users to make them depressed, abuse 2-fator phone numbers for spamming, ask people to upload nudes - many of us couldn't make this up even if we tried..!
there's a decent sized group of people who are outraged when google shuts down any product, regardless of if they used it or had even heard about it before.
I'm not particularly outraged, but the stereotype that Google shuts down projects too frequently to depend upon them is not going to go away when it keeps happening.
I use their mail, as a backup, their maps, and search engine. But I'd think long and hard before I developed against one of their services, or came to rely upon any future-project they released.
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.
Reader, Orkut (yeah!), and Wave were the three I can remember off-hand. I suspect there were more.
I know that I had to cope with some changes to their map-pricing recently too - so I moved to an alternative (easy to manage since I was using leaflet.js as a wrapper).
Rightly or wrongly though I now have the impression that their APIs/Services are not likely to remain.
I know a lot of people in various Open Simulator related communities who are extremely unhappy about it, and are desperately searching for a replacement. Is that close enough?
I just realized this means plenty of long-form posts will poof into non-existence. Currently, the sole benefit from G+ to me is occasionally coming upon a solution to a problem, or at least a discussion, in someone's G+ blog. It so happens that the G+ crowd seems to consist of especially stubborn and strong-willed people with firm opinions, which lets the rest of us mooch off them.