Google Plus is Closing

(note: This is a combination of two blog posts from the Blogger site, mixtapeshistory.blogspot.com)

I got notice that Google Plus is going away. I use Blogger for my blogs so Google Plus just linked right into that. I shared blogs with several communities and read blogs from Google Plus. Apparently Plus was supposed to me a more social media site than blog trading. When I go on today, Google doesn’t even had a link on my blog to send it to a community anymore.

If I was honest with myself, I’m sure most of the views I read in Analytics about my blog were from Google Plus viewers. Now I have a blog and I don’t know if it will have as many or any viewers. I don’t know what the repercussions will be to posting on Blogger. I read that Blogger is still one of the main platforms for bloggers so it appears that will stay. I don’t know where it will feed to. 

From what I get from other authors and bloggers is that Google Plus wasn’t successful for many of them. I read many people who said they stopped using that site years ago. This was news to me. 

Communities are closing down and the posts are fewer and far between. I used to review Google Plus on weekends, but I’ll have to find a new place to go.

I never went on Myspace. That social media site was up and tore down before social media became what it is today. At one time when the Internet was new, people went on chatrooms. Each Internet provider had easy to find links for whatever topic you wanted to talk about. There were sports, religion, local areas and relationships. There were true life stories of people that met in chatrooms. Some of those meets worked out and some were horror stories. The chatrooms were just words, no one could post a selfie. Back then the Internet was slow too, so you had to wait five minutes for a response. Maybe your computer froze and you never knew it.

Around the years 1998 through 2004, there were loads of videos in Earthcam. Earthcam still exists but it looks like location videos. At one time, it was average Internet users posting videos of themselves. Ebaums World became bigger and was popular in the mid-200s. 

Facebook took a lot of those sites out of business. YouTube pretty much ended Ebaums World. 

Google Plus is about to join the list. I was concerned about what that meant to blogging or social media. 

I go to book events and authors will talk up their Internet success. I also hear that many authors have to do a lot of book events. Social media isn’t the big seller they hoped. Face to face meeting is where the sales are. That left me wondering if the pendulum has swung. Is social media dying out? I don’t see any many posts from some of my Facebook friends as I used to. Have they become observers? 

Now that Google Plus has joined that list of sites that are no more, will a new company come around like the ones that came after Earthcam?