Google’s only constant is change

Yesterday, as planned, Google+ closed down, a little less than 8 years after its launch. It never really caught on, and by the time of its demise, a lot of people still didn’t even know about it. And that was probably the main problem.

As I said back in February, the end of Google+ was at most a minor inconvenience. I kept posting new content right up until (nearly) the end, stopping March 31 (our time) so I had time to download my content. That took some time to figure out.

Downloading my personal content was very easy and straightforward, but downloading my Pages’ content (blog and podcast) took me awhile to figure out. In the end, I got it all. The two pages weren’t all that interesting, since the posts were mainly shares of things I posted to this blog or my podcast. My personal account, however, showed that a lot of the sort of stuff I posted on Google + at the beginning (2011) might have been stuff I’d have posted to Facebook or Twitter: Not really personal, sometimes being too jokey, etc. At that time, Twitter was my favourite social media site, and I didn’t much like Facebook. Those two have now swapped places.

But in the early days, I liked Google+ quite a lot, though I drifted away after their poorly thought out and clunky re-design in 2015. By that time, I was already switching to Facebook.

This was true for me.

I came to Google+ the same way I came to two previous failed Google projects, Google Wave (2009-10) and Google Buzz (2010-2011). That is, a friend sent me an invitation. So I was on Google+ before it was public, but even after it was opened up tp the public, it had far less of the awful behaviour that the public parts of Facebook still have. That would seem to have been a good thing about remaining relatively small.

Before all those products, I got myself a Gmail account before they were generally available in New Zealand. I noticed a link buried somewhere that I could click to get an invitation from Google, so I did, they texted me a code, and I was in. I still use that account every day.

What all this means is that I’m used to getting in on the Google ground floor, and also seeing a lot of products shut down while others remain—or change. Google shut down Picassa, their photo service, and merged it into Google Photos, which would be fine except that now the only way I can get to my published blog photos is through Blogger itself—there’s been no integration as there was with Picassa.

Blogger itself has had very little development over the past several years, and it’s really starting to get a bit long in the tooth. Contrast that with Wordpress which has various updates every two minutes (or maybe it just seems like it’s that often…). I’ve long thought that Blogger could be discontinued, or they could make carrying Google ads mandatory (which I’d be okay with, actually, as long as I have a say in what appears so I can block anti-LGBT+ groups, etc.).

The bigger worry for me, though, is that I use FeedBurner to control my RSS Feed for my podcasts (and, in some cases, this blog, like the "Recent Posts" widget in the right sidebar). Google bought FeedBurner from its creators in 2007. In 2011, Google stopped developing it. In 2012, they shut down AdSense for Feeds, which was the only way FeedBurner made any money for Google. I’m surprised it still exists at all.

RSS Feed syndication isn’t nearly as big a deal as it used to be, but many publishers still rely on it—including me. I use it to tell iTunes where to find my podcasts so that anyone subscribing through iTunes can download my episodes, and so I can easily move my podcast site at any time. It's possible for people to manage their own feeds. I have no idea how to do that. Given Google’s long history of dropping products, I think it may be becoming more urgent that I learn.

So, yet another Google product is gone. I still use several of their products, including for this blog and managing my podcast. But everything changes, and that includes the Google products that remain. For Google, it’s certainly true that the only constant is change. Whether that change is good, bad, or neutral is another matter entirely—but it's probably a mixture of all three. Google+ certainly was.