Google+ was released 1 year ago. I don’t know their internal stats, but my experience is just as it was one year ago: strangers adding me to their circles, a few actual friends using it initially, then most of them stopped and currently no interesting content in the news feed. Google people claim some increasing usage and better engagement than facebook, but I just can’t see that happening for me.

For the anniversary they released a History API and Events. So they copied some of the remaining features of facebook, again. But I shouldn’t only flame them for copying things, I’d better suggest something. Remember when twitter got “big”? It coincided with the release of their API. But not a “favorites” API, not a search API. The whole functionality was exposed. Google+ has a rudimentary API that’s not usable for actual applications (I haven’t seen any, and the Google+ features in welshare are not that useful.).

So for one year Google confirmed that there is nothing groundbreaking that will come out of Google+. Google should stop relying on the fact that they are big and think of a way to get popular in a different way than showing red labels at the upper corner of Gmail.