INQUISITR.COM / Science & Tech

Google Plus: Google Finally Admits It Was A Bad Idea

By Mohamed Zeineldine
Published on: 08:58 PST, Jul 31, 2015

Good news for Google Plus skeptics: Its owner is finally admitting defeat.

Yes, that’s right, Google is finally admitting that its adventure into the realm of social media with this rather ill-advised idea was wrong all along.

As CNN Money states, Google is divorcing its popular services from Google Plus, with the first major step being the cancellation of the Google Plus account requirement for YouTube video posting or commenting. (Yes, that moment you obligingly created a Google Plus account just to comment on a viral video or post a video of your own is proving to have been pointless as you’ve expected it to be.)

Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz says the company is currently scaling Google Plus all the way back so it would be attached to no Google service except for itself.

“We want to formally retire the notion that a Google+ membership is required for anything at Google… other than using Google+ itself.”

The company even wrote an apology-sounding post on its blog admitting the failure.

“While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink.”

And, in an attempt to show the company’s follow-up on customer complaints, it said that it heard “that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.”

Better late than never?

Well, the company fell short of deciding to cancel Google Plus altogether. As a matter of fact, it says it’s going to be adding more features to it, including Google Plus Collections. (But don’t worry, if you really want to cancel your public Google Plus page, Google says it will “offer better options for managing and removing those public profiles.”)

Slate magazine’s senior technology writer Will Oremus considers Google’s post to be a defeat in the company’s attempt at building Google Plus into a “Facebook rival.” And while Google says it will offer “a more focused Google Plus experience,” Oremus believes that it will no longer attempt to shadow the Facebook experience and will probably merely be what it has always been good at: a social network for “internet-based communities” to discuss what they love. (Come to think of it, that actually sounds more like a modernized version of the old mailing lists and online forums.)

What’s your take on Google finally arranging a divorce of its better services, such as YouTube, from its rather poorly managed and designed Google Plus? And how has your Google Plus experience been?

[Image by C_osett]

Share this article: Google Plus: Google Finally Admits It Was A Bad Idea
google Internet Facebook
More from Inquisitr