I consider myself lucky to know enough to avoid putting personal information with Google and its properties. But Google is the main platform for many people for many things of a personal nature, and they also end up giving it a lot of information through Android. So any breach has a huge damage surface.
Google+, with all its missteps, was one of those products that even a company with Google's money, resources and people (like Luke Wroblewski) that couldn't get better at all. I liked the concept of "circles" as opposed to the concept of "lists" on Facebook that most people don't know about or use. The only mistake that Google+ did was not copying Facebook on its features. That increased the barriers to adoption and made the product almost worthless. Even something as useful as creating an event was buried in a classic G+ interface, and in the new interface it's buried under profile. Treating vanity URLs as very scarce commodities and letting people live with long unspeakable links, not implementing a groups like functionality well (called "Communities"), and many other things could've been handled if they just copied what Facebook did and took the good lessons from those.
It's sad that Google+ would be gone soon, though it could've been a viable competitor for Facebook as far as centralized, ad supported platforms are concerned. But it's good that an abandoned product gets a quicker death, and that's exactly what Google+ was — an abandoned zombie product trying to figure out whether it was alive or dead.
I'd take this as one less commercial social network to worry about, and await the adoption of a decentralized social network.
Google+, with all its missteps, was one of those products that even a company with Google's money, resources and people (like Luke Wroblewski) that couldn't get better at all. I liked the concept of "circles" as opposed to the concept of "lists" on Facebook that most people don't know about or use. The only mistake that Google+ did was not copying Facebook on its features. That increased the barriers to adoption and made the product almost worthless. Even something as useful as creating an event was buried in a classic G+ interface, and in the new interface it's buried under profile. Treating vanity URLs as very scarce commodities and letting people live with long unspeakable links, not implementing a groups like functionality well (called "Communities"), and many other things could've been handled if they just copied what Facebook did and took the good lessons from those.
It's sad that Google+ would be gone soon, though it could've been a viable competitor for Facebook as far as centralized, ad supported platforms are concerned. But it's good that an abandoned product gets a quicker death, and that's exactly what Google+ was — an abandoned zombie product trying to figure out whether it was alive or dead.
I'd take this as one less commercial social network to worry about, and await the adoption of a decentralized social network.