Google Is Discontinuing Google+ Hangouts On Air On September 12 (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google today quietly announced that Google+ Hangouts On Air will no longer be available on September 12. Four weeks from now, Google users will be asked to use YouTube Live instead. Google first debuted the livestreaming feature for its Hangouts group video chat on Google+ back in September 2011, though it was only available to select performers and celebrities. Google started making Hangouts On Air available to all its users in May 2012, and completed the rollout a month later. But then in May 2013, Google debuted YouTube Live, which also gradually became available to more and more users.

Comments

One less thing

[Anonymous Coward]

And one step closer to the end of that piece of shit called Google+

G+: The Social Network for Sociopaths

[RobotRunAmok]

Google+ is (was?) a better designed and engineered alternative to Facebook, but it was marketed poorly. They positioned themselves as some kind of social network for cool tech people, forgetting that all the real cool tech people were already active with each other in their own online communities, You *had* to be on LinkedIn, because Business, and you *had* to be on Facebook, because Family, even if you weren't active in either, so you really, really needed a good reason to join another social network with strangers. And all that cringeworthy astroturfing and bought-and-paid-for testimonials by the those who were supposed to be our Nerd Leaders, such as Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, and Guy Kawasaki just made the whole thing a laughing stock.

Google is killing a lot of products

[prograsm]

I feel like using Google products is becoming a bad idea, simply because you can expect it to be retired as soon as it becomes useful when they decide to make an identical product under the banner of choice of the moment, or simply kill it with no replacement product at all. This used to be disappointing, but Google does this so often it doesn't affect me any very much more because I won't even try most of their recent offerings knowing they won't keep it around. According to this article, I started avoiding Google's new offerings late 2011 or earlier.

Re:Google is killing a lot of products

[luvirini]

I agree. Basically any product made by Google or purchased by Google means it will likely shut down in few years.

So learning to use and/or switching to any of their products is kind of waste of time and effort that way.

I do use some Google products(mostly Mail,Drive,Maps, Chrome and Android), but I do make sure I have all the information also outside their unreliable environments.

Unreliable being the keyword.

What?

[XSportSeeker]

Man, this is going to piss off a whole lot of podcasters and streamers I know about.... though the ones most dedicated to that abandoned the platform long ago due to complete abandonment and a whole lot of weird glitches, bugs and problems.

But yeah... another proof that people just can't rely on Google to keep up their platforms or even develop them properly. They just keep releasing crap, abandoning development, and then shutting them down. Really doesn't inspire much confidence on the company.

Wanna know what killed G+ ?

[rsborg]

The real name policy was a complete turnoff.

Oh, that and the fact that G+ conflated my "mission-critical" GMail, Voice, Wallet (mainly for Express), and other stuff with my personal life, where I could get banned for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

Yeah, about the same kind of incentive mismatch as Apple Ping (where I had to worry if Apple's closeness with the music/movie industry meant I couldn't discuss torrents/etc).

You have everything to lose (your Google identity) with G+, and little to gain - why should I bother?