Google+ boasts a collection of passionate users, but still can't keep up with the popularity of Facebook and Twitter. In a move, Google is shutting down one its official pages, the Google France page.
"We did not know how to announce it, but here is the Google France Google+ page that will close this weekend. A big THANK YOU to all your contributions during these beautiful years," said the post that also directs its followers to keep up with Google France on Twitter and Facebook for updates.
The move has been predicted, after all, the Google+ page itself wasn't at all that active.
The page's last post before this one, was 46 weeks previous. And the more previous post to that was another 4 weeks, showing just how infrequently Google was in updating its Google France's Google+ page. Here, Google is certain the page is not likely to be missed by its more than 471,000 followers.
The post was accompanied by a short video of searches being performed through Google's search engine on how to best say goodbye.
Google+ was first launched in June 28, 2011. As one of Google's forays into social networking, it indeed experienced strong growth in its initial years. But later on, especially since Facebook took off rapidly, Google+ never managed to really takeoff despite the company’s repeated attempts.
User usage statistics have varied, depending on how the service is defined.
Since them, Google said that the significance of Google+ was less as a Facebook competitor than as a means of gathering and connecting user information from Google's various services.