I drink a cola called Blah Cola. It doesn't mean that Blah Cola isn't dead. In a literal sense of the word it isn't; but for practical purposes, Blah Cola is dead compared to Coca Cola and Google+ is dead compared to Facebook.

Except it's more like if several hundred million other people and I drink "Blah Cola." Even if Google Plus only has 10% of the active users of Facebook - fuck, even 5%, even 1% - that's still millions of people who are using it actively. So yeah - "dead."

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's not because nobody buys them.

That several hundred million people claim is a hoax. It's part of the reason for Vic's departure: instead of actually increasing engagement of Google+, he forced top performing google properties like YouTube to integrate Plus, just so he can claim a portion of YouTube traffic as google+ traffic. It's the kind of shit only an exec from Microsoft would pull.

To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as how many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

Note: There's a reason supermarket chains produce their own, knock-off brands of soda that are cheaper and taste mostly the same as the brand-name. And it's not because nobody buys them.

You're proving me correct by arguing that Plus is equivelent to Supermarket cola. That's an epic failure for google. They launched Plus to become a competitor to Facebook the same way Pepsi competes with Coke. You're conceding that Plus is no Pepsi - and that makes it as good as dead.

> To date Google+ hasn't actually released a clear engagement metric such as how many people have made a post in the past 30 days.

So when they do, you'll claim that Youtube comments don't count right?

Of course they don't count. People commenting on youtube videos are there because of YT's content, not because of +.

He does provide some evidence, although I'm not sure how much like statistics it is. Here:

"Last week, the company parted ways with Vic Gundotra, a talented executive who led Google+ through a thick fog of expectations. The company is also reported to be reassigning team members and sub-products (possibly Hangouts) to other business units. "

He acknowledges that for some things like tech discussion G+ is doing fine. The argument is that, organizationally, Google itself is pivoting away from G+.

On the contrary, maybe you should provide evidence that it's alive because for all practical purposes it's dead.

Nobody I know uses it, those youtube comments look like fabricated conversations, the level of spying by google is just downright creepy.

G+ will never fly, it's a dead product like Glass.