RIP Google+ Ripples

Ripples on Google+ are no more.

If you don't know what they were then you won't miss them.

For me they were a very useful tool for visualising the spread of content. If your job involves content on the web, communication, branding, social, PR, communications etc then you would have loved Ripples lots of reasons. They were especially helpful for reporting.

But not enough people used the feature, so yesterday Google pulled the plug.


Google quietly announced the retirement of Ripples in the official Help community.

What did you miss?

A lot. Here are a few highlight ...


Ripples screenshot showing shares of Gary Turk's Look Up viral video hit.
My observasion was that there were a lot of individual shares, rather than influencer actions.



This is a Ripples close-up screenshot. In that post I was interested in discussing user behaviour: mine, as well as that of others.



This Ripples screenshot is another viral video example: but shows the exact opposite of the first example. It's a post I made to show how different things look when an influential user shares great content. This was Chris Hadfield's share of his epic cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity.

Ripples weren't just useful for observing user behaviour on viral content ....


Since Google (stupidly) made it possible to hide community posts on your profile, Ripples was an easy way to "see" types of user behaviour designed to manipulate. Now it's not so easy.

So just for the record that was the Google+ Ripples feature.
Now Ripples are no more.

Here's hoping something else will take it's place ...

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