Alex Chitu of the Google Operating System sees in Google’s decision to buy into the Twitter firehose the End of the Google+ Era:
Google announced that it will start to display tweets in Google Search for mobile. “When you’re searching on the Google app or any browser on your phone or tablet, you can find real-time content from Twitter right in the search results,” informs Google.
He sees this as the final nail in the coffin of Google+ as a real time social media service:
It’s the end of the Google+ era. Even if Google+ will continue to exist in one way or another, Google will stop promoting it aggressively and will probably use it as a backend service. Bloomberg reports that Google “is set to reveal an online picture sharing and storage service that will no longer be part of the Google+ social network” and “will let users post images to Facebook and Twitter”.
He could well be right. I know that a lot of folk see positives in Google+ as an active network for certain interests, but Google has never been interested in anything less than mega scale, and won’t settle for that, I’m sure.
(Via Google Operating System)