I promise this will be my last post here on Google. Yesterday I deleted what was left of my G+ account. Sure, I could wait out the remnants of what passes for G+ for another two months (the final shutdown date is April 2nd) but frankly I've never been one for removing the band-aid slowly. Why prolong checking in to something that isn't going to be there in two months? I can better use that time for other things. Things like working to build other communities and work on my own material. Why give the power to Google to keep folks in some state of limbo until the final curtain descends on their communities.

I listened a bit to the latest "This Week in Google", where they were lamenting about Google Inbox going away. Mike Elgan brought up a good point about Google Products. He said something to the effect that Google tends to punish the super-users and the early adopters. He's right. Early adopters and super-users made Google+ what it was, the same way they made Google Reader into a premiere news sharing site, and spent the time to learn the arcane ways of Google Voice, Google Hangouts, and other Google products. And it's these super-users and early adopters that seem to get punished for their exuberance. I know plenty of RPG folks who used G+ and Hangouts to host their games in new and exciting ways, and each one of them was punished for doing so by Google removing the capabilities from the product. It's the same with Twitter: the early adopters were the ones that made Twitter applications and found unique uses for Twitter, and now they're the ones getting shut out by Twitter's draconian API changes.

And so I bid adieu to Google+. There's 7+ years of good interactions with folks that I will never be able to replicate. And I'm OK with that. The can take the platforms away, but they can never take back memories.

But they sure as hell don't have my trust anymore.