About four years and two months ago, Google shut down it’s fourth and most ambitious attempt at creating a social network, Google Plus, after almost 7 years and 10 months of operation. At the time I didn’t find that outcome surprising. I already wrote years ago about my initial experience with Google Plus and a follow-up post a year later. You can click those links to read my thoughts, I won’t rehash them here. But as time has passed I’ve come to look back and appreciate what G+ was and, more importantly, what it could have been.

A lot of things in social media since G+ first launched. At the time most folks who were inclined to participate on social media, and that includes myself, were happy with Facebook. Sure many of us would whine whenever they’d slightly change the design, but we’d get over it and keep using it as before. But now I think a lot of active Facebook users really would like to get off Facebook, but still be able to easily keep in touch with friends and family.

I personally have my problems with the site, the main one being the algorithm which only shows you a fraction of your friends’ content. It’s so bizarre, it bases what you see on your feed on the friends you most interact with. But I’m interacting with those people the most because that’s what’s showing in my feed. And it’s the same on Instagram, which Facebook bought about a year after G+ launched. It’s so frustrating, why can’t they at least give us the option to just have our feed run chronologically? Just show me what all my friends are doing in order.

I think Facebook got this way due to being essentially a monopoly. I think if G+ has survived, and was providing them with some real competition that would have been better for users as both companies would be working hard to retain and attract users, and so both sites would be much more user-friendly today.

And then of course there’s Twitter. That’s been going downhill ever since you knew who bought it last year. This is what makes me feel like right now would be the perfect time for G+ to be relaunched. There have been several wanna-be Twitter rivals popping up, like Hive and Mastadon and some others, but nothing has caught fire yet. I feel that to truly rival Twitter and Facebook we need a company with massive resources and brand awareness, which Google has. Even if they didn’t want to bring back the full site, how about a stripped-down version, just focusing on the feed, replicating the Twitter experience? I honestly think that could be very successful today, attracting most Twitter refugees.

But alas, the company has made no indication that they intend on getting back into the social network game. So for now all we can do is reminisce…