Over two years ago now, I wrote one of my first blog posts, focusing on the newly launched Google+ social network and predicting - with a slight dose of hope-induced exaggeration (I did, and still do, like the service, and wanted it to succeed) - that with its introduction there would be something of a shakeup to the social media world.
The range of features it offered - Circles to group contacts and restrict who could see what, followers as well as 'friends', Hangouts for group video chats - gave an impression that the service could pull in elements of Facebook, Twitter and - to an extent - LinkedIn, to essentially create one all-powerful, all-dominant social network. Fast-forward to today, and I don't know of any of my friends or colleagues who use it, and it has become something of a joke in the office. When talking about Web Science research into social media, it still seems to be focused around Twitter (mainly) and Facebook, with little thought ever paid to the unknown, almost forgotten service that I had hoped would take off.
But stepping outside my own personal bubble of academia, it seems things may actually be quite different...
