So it’s a fond-farewell to the occasional little portrait that accompanied things you submitted via or wrote on Google+. It’s officially dead in the water.
I’ll just pause here for a moment for you to dry your eyes.
The whole thing was always a little bit shonky. The take-up was low, the benefits seemingly minimal, and it became yet another thing used solely by SEOs to try and improve their rankings in organic listings.
In some ways, this highlights once again the shortcomings of Google’s mission to ‘organise the world’s information.’ It was easy enough to set up a profile if you could be bothered, but doing so didn’t somehow magically confer authority on either you or your content. In effect, some no-mark from Leeds like me could get their fizzog into the rankings alongside Polly Toynbee or Robert Scoble or whoever.
But that was just an attribution and a tiny sprinkle of glitz in the SERPs. It didn’t make you suddenly an expert in whatever you were talking about. It wasn’t a signal of quality or…. anything really. Just occasionally an extremely mild tingle of delight at seeing your face (or that of a friend) in the rankings.
And in a way, this only further serves to highlight the problem that Google has in the social space. I predicted (in a spirit of larkfulness) that Google+ would be dead in the water by 2013. I was obviously wrong, but only by a matter of time. Google cannot attract content users to seriously engage with its space. The game has been lost, and really all that is left is a disorganised retreat. The abandonment of Google Authorship is merely a waymarker on that long and dismal road.
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