Is Google+ dead yet?

I’ve been seeing lot of posts about Google+ might be killed by Google sometime in the future. With the product head of Google+ [Vic Gundotra is leaving Google](recode.net/2014/04/24/exclusive-google-head-vic-gundotra-leaving-company/). Now questions are being asked is Google going to kill Google+.

Google plus was pretty good back in the day with some good added functions that Facebook lacked, where Facebook copied some of them later. However G+ never got enough frustrated Facebook users to get going and it was slowly adding users just because they had to make a Google+ profile when they make a gmail account.

I remember being really excited when G+ came along, that it will be great and will beat or be a better service than Facebook which I was frustrated with privacy and bad UI experiences. I had to wait for few weeks when a friend sent me an invitation to join G+ back in the day.

This is not the first time Google has screwed up being social, they missed the boat several times. However looking at G+ I think Google never pushed hard enough to get G+ in to the users. Today I read another post that said G+ should have replaced Google reader adding rss feed options to G+. I think it would have been better if Google interrogated G+ into Google chrome more.

Like where chrome start screen having the G+ news feed, and directly share things to their G+ profile directly from Chrome without going to the g+ website. Also interrogating G+ directly to android, where people can share from things from their Android start screens rather than opening another G+ app.

Also why didn’t they try to integrate Google+ posts with search results, like when someone is searching for a movie why not show public posts in the search results that are related to that movie. Like Facebook is doing it with graph-search. Although graph-search is something people I know rarely use it would might have worked for Google.

Another time where Google missed the trick is when Google is trying to copy another social network (Facebook) mobile app social networks like Whatsapp, Snapchat and instagram grew and Google should have tried to outsmart Facebook in the app space by making a social network that was more appealing to teens which increasingly doesn’t like Facebook.

Google might not kill G+ completely, but might stop actively developing it, or interrogate the good things in G+ to android and other things that they do well. Anyway I still think G+ was much better than Facebook and died just because it didn’t get enough users to create the network effect.