Google+; one year after

So, I was all in ecstasy about the launch of Google+ last year. The social network of my dreams, and a potential Facebook-killer had arrived. Not that I disliked Facebook that much, I just felt like it was time for a change. So I jumped the G+ wagon, and started fiddling away with the new universe of social engagement.

That lasted a couple of months. The involvement in G+ vanished on my part. I am not sure why, but I guess I never gained what I expected to gain from my G+ presence. Same goes for this blog really - offline projects became priorities, and I cut my online-time dramatically.

Now it's been a year, and I logged into G+ again for the first time a couple of days ago. My stream was noisy - in fact it was so noisy, that I decided to cut the number of people I follow from almost a 1,000 and down to only around 300. I am not looking into everyone of them, to see if they are actually using G+, and surprisingly enough (?) a whole bunch of them haven't been logged in for 7-11 months.

That tells me that a lot of people did what I did. They signed up, they engaged themselves in this new community and after a short time they quit it. I am still wondering why that is, but I guess that with very few reallife friends in there still, you only gain something from G+ if you are able to use the service in a commercial and/or professional way. Most people are not, as the active users in there are mainly technerds and photo enthusiasts.

Nevertheless, I'm back. Both here and on G+, and I'm planning to stay. A bunch of new projects are coming up, and I'll pay special attention to this little blog, hoping to gain a few more readers within the next couple of months. The goal is 200 listeners via feedburner, at least 100 followers on Facebook and at least 100 followers on my G+ page for the blog, once i get that going. I'll keep you posted as to how that works out.

Monetization of this blog is not yet a priority. I am thinking about completely removing the adsense ads on the blog, and will probably do so within the next couple of days. Iwas also considering moving the blog to another domain (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com) but as the whole idea in the first place was to prove that you can be succesful in blogging using free tools only, that wasn't really an option after all.

In the coming weeks I'll post a few interesting articles for you to read, and hopefully share and comment on. It's been a long time, and I look forward to start bloggin' away once again!